<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Radiant by impanica</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28473198">Radiant</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/impanica/pseuds/impanica'>impanica</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Drug Use, Familial Abuse, Genocide, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Pining, Postcoital Dysphoria, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Shinra Metropolitan Manipulation Theatre, Slow Burn, Suicidal Ideation, Time Travel, War, all good time travellers are walking disasters (and vice-versa)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 14:22:57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>20,886</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28473198</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/impanica/pseuds/impanica</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Rufus puts on the show of the bimillennium.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Rufus Shinra/Tseng</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>41</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p><i>then the voice in my head said</i><br/>WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE<br/>OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS<br/>REVOLT AGAINST IT<br/>WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE</p><p>—Frank Bidart, from “Guilty of Dust”</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Rufus remembers his vice-presidential inauguration party like it was yesterday.</p><p>Before the midnight countdown there was an artificial meteor shower: just chemical dust machine-gunned into the air. Which color it caught fire depended on the drone barrel. With the wind that night, a blackened hail fell all over the upper plate. The hundred-story plummet whipped most pieces cold, but you could always see a few pieces scratch light through the night sky all the way down to the rooftops, where they might burn for hours.</p><p>Had that ever had consequences? Not that Rufus knew, but of course. Those meteors had to be convincing.</p><p>Then the countdown projection. Next to it, 1999 sparkled across the sky in large numerals, and a crowd gathered on the balcony to wait.</p><p>No doubt his father wanted the eve of the new bimillennium to overshadow Rufus’s promotion, which was an insult flung like a knife; old age did nothing to his aim. But Rufus caught it hilt-first instead, and did what he did best: made the rounds, rallied admirers, absorbed the light in every ballroom lounge, so that even when the countdown ran out and four explosive firework 0s tore the year 1999 apart, a comparable crowd never tore their eyes off him.</p><p>After all, Rufus would be the spectacle of the next two-thousand years. He turned to the girl on his left arm, daughter of some military man, and kissed her.</p><p>He remembers flattening her against his front door, hitching up the silk sweep of her dress to bite at a pretty lace garter. Tumbling her into his living room, onto his couch. Then she flung her head back and he thought about pressing his teeth into the soft slope of her throat, but sex wasn’t the only way to teach someone who their god was. And his dearest father had just gifted him a knife.</p><p>The girl’s first reaction to Rufus’s sudden, dangerous silence was to ask him what was wrong, but her first real mistake was to look for the answer in something she had done. No, worse: something she was. So he made her guess, incorrectly. He made her keep guessing. Again, and again, and wrong every time. You could hollow years of life out of a person with this whittling method, except Rufus did not want her years, only the thrill of an hour. By the end of it, she was fleeing his house in tears, but not without the hell Rufus had made in her.</p><p>Satisfied, he picked up her garter and tossed it in the trash. Then he went over to the window.</p><p>The firework smoke was so heavy, the mako reactors glowed yellow as young suns. Midgar was a beautiful city. Before Meteorfall made it a bullet wound, and Holy made it a scar, and the people of Edge made it a burial ground. The most gorgeous battleground in the world. Soon his father would die, and this would all be his. And then he would finally be alive.</p><p>It was well past midnight when he finally lay down in bed with that thought as his pillow, closed his eyes, and slept like the dead.</p><p>Rufus does not remember the morning after, but it could not have gone like this.</p><p>He stumbles out of bed and into the bathroom, falls to his knees before the toilet, and retches for his life. Even after it all comes up, its pulse does not—not until his stomach runs out of water and he is weeping to compensate, knuckles white and cold as the porcelain creaking beneath them.</p><p>There is a scuffling from the bedroom, and a shadow blots the doorway. Darkstar watches him finish his shaking, exhausted, and wash up in the sink. Eventually she wanders away, nosing at a pillow that has fallen off the bed. She has been dead for three years.</p><p>A fine tremor runs through Rufus’s legs as he stares at the mirror.</p><p>Jawline smooth, and even the cords in his neck are softer. Less time layered under everything. Less friction. He touches the cheekbone that Geostigma gnawed away, traces the swell of the eyelid once paralyzed. His eyelashes tickle his palm, heavy and wet, the water blurring everything. But blink it away, and he can see.</p><p>His fingers slip over his face that is growing wetter by the second. Rufus runs a hand through his twenty-three-year-old haircut and listens to the rush of his lungs—broken, watery, but clear. All the old pains are gone. All except an ache in a place he can’t name, an ache he died with.</p><p><em>Ruin.</em> The word crosses his mind, though not like the wild deer over the streets of Midgar. More like his Turks, quietly, through a white room. <em>Ruin, all of it. </em>He remembers lying in a soft bed as the world darkened slowly. A nurse telling Tseng there wasn’t much time left. Himself thinking, no, there never is.</p><p>And then there was darkness, all around him, but parting like cloud cover above. A hand reaching down for him. <em>Do you want to live?</em></p><p>His hand reaching for that hand.</p><p>The bathroom shadows have thinned to the consistency of a steeped tea. Rufus goes into the living room. Outside, dawn seeps into the hem of night, and then the flood of it comes, darkening the clouds, loosening their fragrance.</p><p>Just like that: the sun.</p><p>His vision is blurring again. The heat of sunlight is in his eyes. He smothers it out with his sleeve.</p><p>His PHS blinks in the bedroom. One of his secretaries has cleared his entire morning on the assumption that he will be too hung-over to function before noon. Aside from that, it is the first day of the year 0000, and he is the vice-president of Shinra Electric Power Company with a schedule and obligations, neither of which he remembers.</p><p>Rufus drops the PHS and goes to the kitchen. He stands in it dumbly, unsure of the old movements. What does he need?</p><p>Water?</p><p>Oh, water. He checks the filter reading on the sink, fills a kettle, and sets it to boil. He goes looking for his stock of teas.</p><p>It is time to take inventory.</p><p>Rufus, for the life of him, cannot recall the year 0000 standing out in any way compared to 0001, and 0007, and—well, every year after. There is the Wutai War, which will be nearing its end soon. Godo has no last legs to stand on, so he has been clinging to his country’s independence by the teeth, and although Fort Tamblin will not fall until next year, the months leading up to it will crack those teeth in.</p><p>Rufus cracks two eggs in a bowl and whisks them with a fork. Of course, Shinra won’t defeat the devils in the west without SOLDIER at the height of its glory. And SOLDIER will not be even half as successful as fate demands if not led by First Class General Sephiroth, who is alive.</p><p>As his father is alive.</p><p>And gods, the volume of food in his fridge is as surprising as his sudden, visceral empathy for the poor. Did he really have an entire compartment dedicated to drinks alone? People in Edge would have killed for this much, and by people he means himself.</p><p>But Sephiroth will not make a slaughterhouse of the world, starting with Nibelheim, until next year. Before then, the other First Classes will go rogue in the late summer, and their subordinates will desert en-masse. Lazard’s hand in the rebellion will not be discovered until Shinra finds it with the rest of his corpse. Regardless, the company will blame him for its losses. Rufus remembers: it is the closest his father will ever come to beating another woman’s son.</p><p>His egg pancake is bubbling nicely. The texture of the pan has given the underside a golden turtle-shell pattern. He wets a real, non-metaphorical knife and starts chopping the filling: scallions, tomatoes, curled parsley, mushrooms. Elena would ask for a layer of cheese, but only after offering a tie for his hair, and only <em>after</em> laughing at it, him, and the whole godforsaken mess.</p><p>She just turned twenty in Rufus’s memories, which makes her—what, ten years old now? That’s closer to the fetal stage than anything.</p><p>Not that Rufus has a healthy or reasonable understanding of children, as Reno once insisted. He and Rude will be around, of course. Tseng is still Veld’s second-in-command. The Turks as a department will not be drawn and quartered until AVALANCHE is made to suffer the same, and that long hard journey will not begin until early next year, or perhaps this winter—or really, whenever Rufus decides to instigate it. Fuhito and Shears are his cards to play.</p><p>His tea tastes like a warm sky. He sets it down in a sunlit spot on the counter, where caustics weave a rainbow placemat around the glass saucer.</p><p>Tseng, the concept of him, is still hooked on his line of thought. Is Rufus forgetting something about him, or is he remembering too much?</p><p>Darkstar has lain down in her bed again, but at his soft “D,” she comes to the kitchen. He opens a container of leftover beef tongues he found in the back of the fridge and sets it down for her. The hound laps them up like water. Then she goes to get actual water. Then she returns, this time to stare at him as if he’s grown a wing.</p><p>“New year, new me,” he tells her. Does she think she can judge him? She’s a dog.</p><p>A good omelette has just become the opposite of his last meal. If Rufus were the type of person who sets time aside for breakdowns, he would have done that instead. As it is, he washes dishes; he multi-tasks. What does it mean, to travel seamlessly from your last day alive into a day that feels more like your first? There are probably spiritual implications to it: soul, memory, selfhood, whatever <em>it</em> is, passing from one older deader body to its younger living twin. A transplantation of time, across time. It defies all material science.</p><p>Or maybe it doesn’t. He supposes that the body already works that way: on a cellular level, a living human replaces themselves multiple times throughout their lifespan. Cells create clones; genetic information achieves continuity. That is the real aim of the cellular ideology: cumulative time.</p><p>Rufus would know. Countless hours he and Reeve spent pouring over Geostigmatic genetic samples, observing in real time how the most ruthless cancer in the world handled their education. The lesson was simple: death is a living being. It moves, not just through the bodies of the sick, but in that place behind their eyes. In their dreams. In the people who they leave behind. In the neighborhood ten minutes south of Healen Lodge, where Rude could no longer buy groceries because the vendors had stopped going work; they boarded the windows, X’d the doors, and lay down in bed with their families. All of them pristinely preserved, all breathing the air of coffins. Meanwhile the lines of graves in Midgar became so accomplished that they started to form a geoglyph; the WRO’s epidemiological forecast predicted an entire new alphabet in the future. And in his room in the lodge, Rufus woke every night washed in sweat and shock, as the virus’s whispers echoed through the caverns of him—how could something have such plans for him and yet hate him <em>so much?</em></p><p>Gently, he strokes his thumb over Darkstar’s head. It’s like petting a worn leather sofa and all the comfort it contains.</p><p>This, whatever <em>this</em> is, is not comparable to Geostigma. His future self has not come to enslave his past self with great designs. Nor does it whisper to him how it hates him so—although<em> it </em>is technically also <em>him</em>, and that brings up the question of whether or not he hates himself, if he regrets things, and it would be stupid at best to open the Rosado whiskey kept in the bottom left cabinet this early in the morning.</p><p>Maybe this is supposed to be a good thing, or so Elena—yes, probably only her—would suggest. Not decay, but growth? The feathery segment of Lifestream in him wanting to build differently upon its knowledge? But that would imply some sort of divine interference, as if the Planet has stumbled upon Rufus in the back of the attic, taken him to the workshop table, and made repairs. That’s <em>ridiculous.</em></p><p>Yes, he knows that the Planet is an intelligence and a sentience who is capable of isolating certain individuals in its attention; his memory of the Weapons does not allow him to forget. Yes, he knows that gods walk this earth with them—Leviathan, Shiva—to perform extraordinary feats. But he also knows that, in terms of practicality, God is dead, having killed itself to avoid him. God is nothing but a cave with an echo. God whispers, <em>it is kinder to myself to pretend you don’t exist.</em></p><p>Darkstar sniffs his sleeve, curious of the salt still drying there.</p><p>No matter the action or the reasons behind it, Rufus is still the consequence. He has to be lived with.</p><p>He’s watched enough bad rom-con and sci-fi over Rude’s shoulder to understand that most people would die for—would <em>do anything</em> to be blessed with a second chance. Meryn Aber’s fool in <em>Birds of Paradise </em>wasted the eternity of a time loop, or two hours of Rufus’s evening, learning to dance well enough to duet the love-interest-competent-star who also definitely played that one waitress in <em>Shoreline. </em>The point, as Rufus has come to learn, is not that Aber should stick to his typecast, or that Rude’s cinematic taste should be punishable by law. The point is that those two hours were a gift.</p><p>Rufus dresses methodically: vantablack suit, white overcoat, gloves, shoes. Miraculously, after easing some cream into it, his hair decides to spare his life for the next 24 hours. He looks like a man who steps on the world’s neck on his way out the door every day. His old self—himself. For his purposes, there will be no discernible difference.</p><p>Darkstar’s ears perk up at the sound of a quarter flicking into his hands; his coins haven’t been invented by Weapons yet, but he can ease that development along.</p><p>Another task for the list.</p><p>He taps the quarter on the living room table. “Let’s go.” Darkstar helps him put on her collar and brightens at the jingle of his keys.</p><p>Outside is a whole planet doomed for hell, but Rufus is still thinking of cells. Best teachers of survival. The lesson: it doesn’t matter what you are killing or saving by coming into the world. You just need to know what you want.</p><p> </p><p>—</p><p> </p><p>By all rights, it’s a fucking seance.</p><p>Out of everyone attending this paranormal nightmare that his secretaries have insanely labeled BOARD MEETING AT 1400, only Reeve can count himself among the rare category of survivors. Not even Rufus has that honor. For the full hour he rubs the coin clean between his gloves while the other specters fight over the invisible planchette on the table. More often than not it moves with Heidegger, who has brought in his colonels to present on SOLDIER’s victory in Ao Kan and the line of scrimmage pushing northward. Lazard smiles, speaks when necessary, and is absent in every other way: a self-aware ghost. And Reeve, out of everyone, is the biggest imposter of them all. Never mind the personality, he looks <em>well-rested.</em></p><p>His father is smoking a pack of Brittans, each one as thick a missile. They toss up the grit and shrapnel of a bombed-out town. When the meeting ended, everyone else files out, while Rufus waits for his father to have the gruff last word with his assistants.</p><p>“A word, Mr. Vice-President,” says Veld, suddenly in his vision.</p><p>Rufus’s first instinct is to blink him away like a floater. He doesn’t remember much of Veld, only that the Turk’s presence is the kind that people don’t notice until he thinks they should, at which point they say <em>oh</em>, and any smile, laugh, or clever joke rising within them drops dead to the coldest points of their feet—and that, in its own way, is admirable. But he never <em>liked</em> Veld. Perhaps because he lacked confidence in his twenties, and Veld is not one to give it. “What is it?”</p><p>“In private, if possible.”</p><p>“You’re next in line,” says Rufus, and Veld’s gaze comprehends his father. “My office in ten.”</p><p>“Sir.” Veld gives a curt nod and leaves.</p><p>The doors shut behind him and his father’s assistants. Rufus wheels his quarter down the length of the table towards his father, who has begun sorting through his papers. He glances up, registers Rufus, and keeps sorting. “Damn Palmer making me repeat myself.” Cigars have paved his voice with fresh gravel. “Talking about a funding drought during a <em>war.</em> The man hasn’t produced a damn thing of worth since he seized Thompson’s throne, and still he has the nerve to beg for more. He should be begging me for his head.”</p><p>“You always told me he had a role to play.” Rufus flips the coin up, elegant. “I never figured that one out.”</p><p>“He’s obedient. Was. None of his predecessors knew their place quite as well.” Before Rufus can figure that one out, his father pins him with a look. “Some girl taught you party tricks?”</p><p>He slides the quarter into his pocket. He will play the role of his father’s son, yes. Play it well under pain of death. “Different girl.”</p><p>“You should be spending your time on more important matters. Preparing for your flight back, for instance.”</p><p>“To Junon?” Rufus watches his father open a pen with one hand. Out of everyone in the tower, only he and the Turks insist on old-fashioned bookkeeping. His father prefers a heavy ink for his slashed l’s and sharp hooked j’s, his luxurious k’s that loop outside the personality of precision. Always bleeding through the back of regular paper. Has anything even changed? Rufus expected to find a version of his father a decade younger, but between the man who bled out around Sephiroth’s blade and the man who bloodied Rufus’s childhood, every slice of him seems the same.</p><p>Rufus spent so much of his life wanting this man dead. He even thought it once: <em>at least I got to outlive my father</em>. And now all that work, all those sleepless nights and seizures of hatred, have been unraveled from end to end.</p><p>How is he even supposed to begin to feel about that?</p><p>“<em>Yes</em>, to Junon.” His father’s voice has darkened. “Those parties have bleached your brain out.”</p><p>He shouldn’t feel anything, if he knew to focus.</p><p>With a hum, Rufus begins to circle his father, though not too closely. Hunger, fear. It is important to express these things equally. “Lovely place this time of year. The early sunsets next to the water are to die for. It’s just a shame,” and here he stops, glancing at the plate’s edge rising like a dirty blanket above the windowsill, “that no view will ever compare to the one we have here.” He can feel his father’s eyes on him. “I’ve been thinking—it would be nice to enjoy it a while longer.”</p><p>The sounds of writing pick up again. “You’ll return to Junon and work on the Mako Cannon as the company directs.” A lift of the pen. “You’ll be abandoning your toys, otherwise.”</p><p>“Scarlet can have them.” Rufus has something far more sinister: his father’s full attention. “Anyone with eyes can see that every day spent apart from her baby is agony to her. Either I can finish it or she can, but we both know how the project will flourish once it’s back in her hands. Then there’s the matter of Colonel Nacara’s reports, about a suspicious lack of productivity in Zone 4...” He shrugs a shoulder. “I could always give her the experience.”</p><p>His father grunts. “Her so-called-’bloodthirst’ is embarrassing to witness.”</p><p>“Power goes to her head,” he agrees. “Although, unlike Heidegger, it doesn’t trip her.”</p><p>“You discussed this with her?”</p><p>“No, actually. Call it a late Christmas present.”</p><p>“She was brought here,” the writing resumes, “for the war.”</p><p>“The war doesn’t need her anymore. Heidegger has the leash, if the volume of air he pollutes in these meetings is any evidence.” His father doesn’t laugh out loud, but his body rocks with the recoil. “SOLDIER’s been on-stage for months on end. The rest of us have been bored out of our minds.”</p><p>That gets the laugh out of his father. “I couldn’t imagine putting you in charge of seeing this business through,” he says, dropping the pen with a specific, dangerous gravity. “This close to victory and yet, with your attitude, you’d still find a way to lose.”</p><p>“I’d reserve those worries for Heidegger.”</p><p>“That’s what this is about, then. Your petty squabbles.”</p><p>Yes, if left unchecked, Heidegger will prove a nuisance in nearly all of Rufus’s plans. But no, his plans are not petty<em>.</em> He takes irritation out of its cage and lets it flit through the window of his face. Too emotional and he’ll be written off by that pen, but too composed and his father won’t sense their game is winnable. “Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it,” he tries, leaning in. “We’ve been slaughtering Wutai on the field. Doing so well, and so close to victory, it must be difficult for Heidegger to keep his cool.” He smiles. “Poor thing. So much of the company is at stake, after all. Revenue, reputation…” His father has gone back to reading his files. “I believe I heard a rumor—”</p><p>“Maybe if you listened during these meetings, you wouldn’t rely on secretarial gossip as your primary source of information.” An edge in his father’s voice—for Rufus? No. Good. “If you must know, that presentation earlier was a damn farce. We took a step forward through some worthless Wutai rice patty and a step backward from our victory flag in Tamblin.” A heavy finger taps a bruise into the table. “The only reason I let it slide is because he promised me, by the end of the month, there’ll be<em> returns.”</em></p><p>With a scoff, Rufus pushes off the edge. “That’s sloppy.” Contempt for both Heidegger and his father, but not too thick. Nobody likes a heavy icing. “This always happens. His excitement gets the best of him. You never liked that about him either.”</p><p>“No. Which is why the last thing I need is someone like you,” the finger taps, “making it harder for him to do his job.”</p><p>“What do you think I’ll do, kill him?” <em>That’s </em>funny. “Nobody’s performance will ever improve without some sort of challenge to motivate them. Say I knock the man down a few pegs. Onto his knees, even. He’ll have no choice but to work harder for what he wants, which will be to Shinra’s benefit.”</p><p>Silently, his father closes the file and tucked it under his arm. This means that he will concede to the point, but not for free. He demands that Rufus wait the necessary seconds; snap, finally, “Don’t tell me your philosophy’s changed, I’m practically quoting company guidelines at this point—”</p><p>“And you’ll bask in the pleasure of humiliating an adversary, I’m sure,” says his father.</p><p>That face. At twenty-three years old, it would have inspired instant rage in Rufus. Envy, even, for that level of craft. Now Rufus feels oddly detached, and not just because of the compartmentalization of acting. “I’m kind enough to share,” he says, rearranging his features into an imperfect mirror. He, like Heidegger, should be sloppy. “You know I’d be far more useful in Midgar anyway, with my new vice-presidential permissions.”</p><p>“In Junon you were out of my way. Ah, but I know. I was also out of yours.” His father’s eyes are like crows. Not just the frame of their feet, but their spirit. “You thought long and hard about all of this, didn’t you?”</p><p>They both know he is not praising Rufus’s strategic logic. In other words, <em>you don’t think I know how pathetic you looked when you were practicing this conversation in the mirror?</em></p><p>Something in Rufus thrashes against a windowpane, but the walls don’t shake. <em>Strange</em>, Rufus thinks, even as fire and brimstone flashes through his own eyes. “Not at all,” he says. “I just know what I want.”</p><p>It’s like he doesn’t know who his father is talking to, anymore.</p><p>“So now you want to be productive.” Another long look holds Rufus in place, firm as any hand, before releasing him. “Good. It’s about time. Finish those pending negotiations of yours and bring me good news by next week.” His father heads for the door. “And cancel your flight.”</p><p>“I’ll give Scarlet the good news,” Rufus calls after him. The door swings shut.</p><p>Darkstar rises to her feet as he steps out of the room. Walking back to the vice-president’s office, he scrolls through his schedule and secretaries’ notes to figure out what the hell “pending negotiations” means. No rest for the wicked in Midgar apparently, despite the holidays. His step falters—<em>he just won against his father.</em></p><p>This is the first time he’s ever played their game and lost nothing. And isn’t that all his twenty-three-year-old self ever wanted? Not just to get what he wanted, but to<em> lose nothing?</em></p><p>It isn’t an achievement anymore, Rufus reminds himself, regaining his pace. He once believed those small battles were the great wars. That was before Sephiroth, the Weapons, Geostigma—before he woke up gasping from a nightmare three days after his father’s death and, with a rage indistinguishable from terror, threw his bedside lamp against the floor. No, this will not be enough. To get what he wants, he’ll have to win every time, and many more times than this.</p><p>Securing his place in Midgar is only the first step. The next is to round the corner and see Veld in the waiting room, conversing with a secretary whose name Rufus should really get around to learning.</p><p>And there, standing next to Veld, is Tseng.</p><p>The first thing Rufus notices is the ponytail. He wants to ask, <em>are you cooking, sparring, or having a crisis? </em>Just once, Tseng loaned his hair to an old woman who had come down with an impulse to do a traditional Gongagan braid. You start with a ponytail, parse it into ten silks, and end up with something like a flower bow on a gift box. The woman had a charred branch of an arm, but her fingers were steady, and her humor deathly dry. Rufus lounged nearby with a lifestyle coaching magazine from 0005 and they picked fun at the ridiculous articles—DOWN IN THE DUMPS OF A MOBILE HOME? TIME TO AESTHETICIZE! What the fuck?—until the tiny print shut down his bad eye.</p><p>Veld’s and Tseng’s eyes are upon him. “Sir,” says Veld.</p><p>Rufus pushes into his office, newly renovated in advance of his promotion. Everything smells like nameless hydrocarbons. “What a rare visit, Director,” he purrs, rounding the desk. “What can I do to bring you around more often?”</p><p>“I would like to congratulate you for your promotion on behalf of Administrative Research,” Veld replies, completely unaffected, “as well as inform you of your updated relationship with our department.” Rufus looks up sharply at that, remembering what this is. “As you are aware, for the past twenty-three years, a rotation of agents ensured your personal safety at home and overseas. That mission remains active at all times. However, due to your elevated position in the company, and in accordance with routine re-organization practices, we have made some changes to your security detail.”</p><p><em>“Have</em> you,” says Rufus. “You’re aware that the ‘rotation of agents’ who haunted my childhood included probably every single member of the Turks.” He lets his eyes slide over to Tseng, who plays a convincing shadow. “You too, if I recall.”</p><p>Veld goes on. Rufus’s detail will now consist of agents assigned to stable positions—Rude, Reno, maybe others. Tseng will be the liaison between him and the department. Tseng’s face is the picture of white-gloved dispassion, but Rufus knows resentment simmers beneath it. Years of muddying his shoes in mako and blood as the Turks’ best solo agent only to let that long track dry, because becoming Veld’s second-in-command means getting accustomed to what amounts to Shinra steward service.</p><p>Rufus—with his sex and drug habits, wealth-poisoned behavior, and patricidal tendencies—did not make the job any more tolerable. <em>Was that your first impression of me?</em> he remembers asking Tseng over coffee and a pack of cigarettes lying between them, like a grenade, because Elena would kill them if they opened it. <em>Tell me what you thought. Spoiled little daddy’s boy, albeit devastatingly handsome and dangerously intoxicated?</em></p><p><em>Devastating</em>, Tseng said. <em>Dangerous.</em></p><p>Never, throughout all their time together, had Tseng underestimated Rufus’s capacity for destruction. So that would probably have to change.</p><p>Veld keeps going. As vice-president, Rufus now has the ability to exercise limited command over the Turks. Clearance up to level 3, and if he needs their “investigative assistance”, Tseng will be his correspondent. “Then you’d better be a keeper,” says Rufus, in a voice that makes Tseng snap to attention somewhere behind the face. That is genuinely amusing. Old Tseng never did that. “You’ll do anything I tell you to do, is that right?”</p><p>“Within stated parameters, sir.”</p><p>“We’ll explore those.” Neither of them is blinking. “And to think, I haven’t even gotten your number yet.”</p><p>“You’ll have it now, sir.” Tseng hands over his PHS. “I’ve already taken your secretaries’ at their desk.”</p><p>Rufus takes it without even looking at it. “Now, that’s <em>very</em> forward.”</p><p>“If you’ll excuse me, sir,” says Veld, clearly having none of this. “Tseng can answer the remainder of your questions.”</p><p>As the director exits, Rufus types in his number, then slides both of their phones to Tseng. “I assume I don’t have to wait to go anywhere before the director picks my new detail.” Brusqueness. Self-centered impatience, consequence of privilege. Disregard for Tseng’s presence already, because Rufus Shinra views Turks as interfaces, not people. He is ticking all of the boxes.</p><p>“All assignments will be finalized by tomorrow morning. For any events scheduled today, I will be available to escort you.” Tseng meets his gaze with his own, black and cool. “I look forward to working with you, sir.”</p><p>Rufus’s amusement glitters. “Keep that up. You can start by getting the car. My dog wants to go home, and I have an outing.”</p><p>“Sir,” says Tseng, and leaves Rufus in his wake.</p><p>There are probably spiritual implications to the fact that the Turks do not recognize him, nor themselves in him. That they are currently loyal to each other first, his father second, and nobody third. That Rufus exists somewhere in the margins of that third. And yet, in his mind, Rufus can replay his last day alive on a broken record. <em>Yes, I’m here,</em> Tseng says in that replay. It is maybe the last thing Rufus ever heard. The last knowable voice in the world. <em>I’ll be here when you wake up.</em></p><p>And in the end, was it even a lie?</p><p>Rufus has bowed over his desk, his hand pressed against his abdomen. The ache is back and he is searching for it. If it would just hurt a little more, start beating at him like a first or a heart, he could find it. But it seems that even after everything, he still had some trepidation left for pain.</p><p>Be<em> present. </em>Angels above, he has <em>work </em>to do.</p><p>He and Darkstar take the executive’s elevator down to the second garage, where they are greeted by a sleek black car rolling up to the platform. Tseng opens the door for his dog to climb in. Then he rounds to the other side and opens one for Rufus. Watching him move, streamlined by the sharp lines of his suit, Rufus realizes two things. The first is that twenty-three-year-old Tseng is hilariously under-experienced with guard hounds, but rather skilled at hiding it.</p><p>The second is that Tseng, in the future, had been so, so tired.</p><p>Flipping the long hem of his coat behind his hip, Rufus leans against the car and fixes Tseng with a crow’s interest. “I meant what I said, that I remember you. Do you?”</p><p>Tseng returns with a <em>look, </em>which is familiar. Then he closes the door and considers the question. Even at this age, he is his darkness. He is also beautiful. Both constants of the continuum. “I believe I was assigned to your protection twice,” he says, apparently oblivious to Rufus’s appreciation of the land between his nacre earring and shirt collar, “once for your cruise to Mideel, and the other for routine commute.”</p><p>Experimentally, Rufus spins the coin out and skips it along his knuckles. “The latter,” he says. “Punishment duty?”</p><p>“No, sir.” <em>But this is,</em> Tseng doesn’t say. “An uncomplicated errand, while my usual work was in review.” His gaze flickers like light over Rufus’s hand.</p><p>“And the former?”</p><p>“I was still a rookie at the time, sir.”</p><p>Rufus catches the coin. “I remember I asked the Turks to set up a makeshift firing range,” never mind that they were on a fucking boat, but he was mad at his father, and hideous for it, which is the explanation for pretty much his entire youth, “and like good little employees, they said no. I told them I wanted to test my new rifle. Eventually you were ordered to confiscate it, but instead, you decided to kick it out of my hand and toss it into the sea.”</p><p>Tseng is receiving an education today: Rufus Shinra has a memory for grudges. Rufus Shinra will not make his job easy. Rufus Shinra is his goddamn age and would have no right to be his superior if not for primogeniture. “My condolences,” says Tseng, absolutely flat.</p><p>Rufus can’t help his laugh. At twenty-three years Tseng has <em>no </em>control over his temper.</p><p>In just a few short hours they will be driving to Hotel Casino Dejay in Sector 1, where Rufus will meet with Midgar’s budding entertainment royalty and push forward Shinra’s interests. He will not break character once. He will bring home a partner for the night, mostly for networking and reputation maintenance. Tseng will be reminded of his misfortune, having been functionally demoted to chauffeur. He will re-solidify Rufus’s personality in his mind: proud, ruthless, predictable in his desires. He will dismiss this entire conversation as inscrutable data—most likely Rufus flirting as he flirts with everybody, Rufus using a Turk to test-run a charisma.</p><p>Which is why Rufus says, “On the contrary.” Whatever is on his face right now, for once, he doesn’t know. “I should be thanking you for what you’ve done for me in the future.” Tseng frowns, puzzled by his phrasing, but he isn’t done. “I promise I’ll make it worth it.”</p><p>A week before Rufus died, Reeve came to his bedside with the conclusion to their findings. Three years they had spent believing that Geostigma was not contagious, though all infection maps said otherwise, because it could not be passed by physical or casual contact. Not by kissing, fucking, spitting while talking. It <em>could</em> be handed down genetically, as they discovered with the Geostigmatic stillborn. But how could that explain the numbers?</p><p>It turned out they had not considered all possible modes of transmission.</p><p>Despair carries it, Reeve said. That is how it slaughters friend groups and families. That is how it empties neighborhoods in the city. It is this human state, as teachable as language, as edible as air, as fateful as birth, that is ending all of their lives.</p><p>That afternoon, as usual, Tseng clothed, bathed, and fed Rufus in place of the palliative care nurses who were thin-strung over a million like cases. As usual, the other Turks were more obedient; they kept away. Rufus did not ask Tseng, <em>are you hiding the first symptoms? </em>Just as he did not ask, <em>how can you bear to do this for me? </em>Just as he did not ask, <em>why are you still here?</em></p><p>Rufus does not know what the reason was. Only that it was the same one, each time, that stopped him.</p><p>If the Planet has resurrected his soul from the river of the dead and carried it across time, there should be some rationale to it. Perhaps the last son should repent for everything Shinra wrought, him being the final failure of the legacy. Perhaps that is only his own psychological warpath. Rufus wonders if the Planet even knows what is good for it anymore while on this flaming trajectory, fading slowly; he wonders if it is actually possible that he was revived and brought to past because of some colossal, cosmic mistake.</p><p>But on a deeper level, Rufus knows the truth. His knowledge of it is baseless, irrational. It is ancient. He thinks it was living in him even before he was born. He thinks it will outlive the universe.</p><p>He looks at Tseng, who is ten years younger and unafraid, and knows, <em>I came back to thank you.</em></p><p>The ever-present breeze in the garage tugs at them gently. Tseng’s expression shifts in increments. Surprise, rejection of surprise, irritation, the calculations coming up empty—what the hell is Rufus even saying? Then a small, uncontrollable amusement blooms, right at the corner of his mouth.</p><p>“If you’d like to express your gratitude, sir,” says Tseng, “you may do so by getting in the car.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>So this is your average time travel fix-it, but the OG timeline is altered so that Rufus becomes vice-president at the beginning of 0000 rather than the end, nobody gets cured of Geostigma at the end of AC, &amp; other small, haha, changes. Also I’m thinking about replacing the Whispers with something a little bit different, not sure what yet.</p><p>A lot of the plot for this fic was actually inspired by watching crackpot theory videos on YT, especially Sleepezi’s, although I’ll respectfully disagree with the ‘Rufus is a Cetra/Jenova clone/etc’ idea that some people have. It’s funnier to me that his reasons for being the way he is are all too human.</p><p>Anyway, I’m excited! Let’s fucking go!!!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Rufus wakes up with instant vigilance and a woman in his arms. He dreamt that he was following a familiar little boy through the wreckage of Midgar, and then he fell through a hole in the plate. He lies still. All he can make out is his bedroom and the woman’s back, both noisy with warmth.</p><p><em>Go back to sleep, </em>thinks the part of him that is here. <em>Save yourself, </em>thinks the rest of him, tumbling.</p><p>Dawn clambers over them to color on the opposite wall. Eventually the woman stirs, mumbling, “What time—? Oh, gods, my flight—”</p><p>For a venture capital investor’s trophy idol, this one is quick to say yes to things. Which is why Rufus doesn’t mind rolling them over and kissing her deep into the sheets. “It’s delayed,” he says when they break apart.</p><p>Gasping, “What?”</p><p>“Sweetheart,” says Rufus, fluttering both of their throats, “I’m delaying it.”</p><p>“Oh, <em>gods,”</em> she says again.</p><p>By the time Rufus has done her one better, postponed her flight with a call, and finally kicked her out of the house—a little unsympathetically, as is his style—a headache has clamped its baby teeth on his left temple. Too little sleep and too much thinking. It is never going to change. He checks his schedule, feeds Darkstar, and makes coffee.</p><p>The machine whirs while the brew pot fills. In Healen, breakfast, like suffering, tried to be communal. There was a designated tray for food that families brought in, like dry rice, luscious bone broth, or hard brown muffins made with unburied erythritol. Every day one of the nurse’s sons carted the tray around to the Geostigmatic who were receiving experimental apheretic treatment. The hope was to enact vengeful traumatization upon the disease by bullying enough needles into as many black veins as possible. Of course, the body took all the blows. A muffin was the smallest form that an acceptable apology could take.</p><p>When Judd was alive, Rufus would help him by drizzling coffee like syrup over the pastry of choice, softening it into a sponge. That way Judd could excavate it with a spoon. The man had barely any upper body strength left and would allow Rufus to pour the brew pot, but insisted that a larger dignity would be lost by not feeding himself. <em>You know, when you’re in my spot, those Turks are gonna be in yours.</em></p><p><em>Oh, they’ll flee like sensible employees, </em>Rufus replied, and so sealed this moment in memory.</p><p><em>Yeah, yeah, your playground theater. You’re the boss and they’re your workers until dinner gets called, and then you’re just people again.</em> Judd could be cruel, in his sickness. <em>Aren’t you guys getting a little too old for that now?</em></p><p>His PHS lights up with a message from Tseng. It’s the file containing the profiles of his new detail. Sitting on the kitchen tile, Rufus drops his forehead against his dog’s happy body and scrolls through the names: Rude, Reno, Emma, and Freyra. The former two are absolute. The latter are the back-up, which makes sense to Rufus; he doesn’t remember their accompaniment much, only knows Emma as Elena’s sister—the eyebrows, the round jaw—and Freyra as the excellent shot who trained him in his teens.</p><p>Most of the information in all four documents has been redacted. The pictures do not render them. No justice for them is done.</p><p>“I missed you so much,” he whispers, stroking Darkstar’s face. She huffs a grassy scent into his shoulder.</p><p>Outside, his service pulls into the lot. Rufus finishes his preparations and opens the front door. <em>Everyone’s hair is shorter except mine,</em> is the first thing he thinks as Rude and Reno step out of the car.</p><p>The last he had seen of Reno was in a collage of pictures from the WRO quarters in Costa del Sol, labeled WISHING YOU WERE HERE (three cry-laughing emojis), that featured him posing with a cocktail in increasingly inappropriate places to pose with a cocktail. His beliefs about photo filters were carried over from his cooking: there was no such thing as “too many” spices slapped onto a chicken roast. Rufus, Tseng, Elena, and Rude were unable to stop talking shit about these pictures. As for Rude, he had just come back from 7th Heaven, where Barret Wallace’s daughter had painted milky flowers on his nails. Naturally, he showed them off at Rufus’s bedside by taking Rufus’s hand in his.</p><p>So sappy, his Turks were.</p><p>“Morning, boss,” calls Reno, “Rude and Reno, at your service.” Like anyone who lives his nine lives on the tight-rope between Shinra’s good and bad graces, he has a performance for strangers and leash-holders. It is lean and lazy and currently center-stage.</p><p>These are not his Turks. They are each other’s and his father’s. Carefully feeling nothing, Rufus says, “Vice-president or not, I don’t need two people at one wheel.” Behind Reno, Rude folds his hands behind his back and looks like a tall glass of blackcurrant.</p><p>“Ah, partner’s just tagging along.” Reno notices Darkstar. “Might just kick him out, actually.”</p><p>“I can make room, sir,” Rude agrees.</p><p>“Rude would walk through shit and snow before inconveniencing a dog, sir,” adds Reno. Rude clears his throat.</p><p>“But not for me, is it?” Rufus asks. And because he is the embodiment of that Shinra-manufactured tight-rope, that silvery line between treat and threat, Rude assembles an apology with his shoulders, and Reno opens the door to divert Rufus’s attention.</p><p>They are both very good at this. Rufus should be prouder.</p><p>There is room, of course; Darkstar is large for a guard hound but can fold down better than a car seat. “Right, boss,” says Reno while buckling in, “looks like we’re with you for the long haul. Anything you want taken care of, just let us know.”</p><p>They have no idea just how long that haul will be. “For now, you can take care of me. I assume you can drive."</p><p>Reno starts the ignition.</p><p>Rufus props his elbow against the ledge of the window, watching his house curve away from them. On a winter morning, the east side of Sector 0 rising off the expressway looks simulated—monochromatic, the shadows glowing. Rude and Reno talk to each other using their “babysitting” voices, which just means they are being quiet enough not to disturb the public figure in the back. They are apparently workshopping a new name, either for a cat or a coworker. Occasionally, Rude’s shoulders shake with silent laughter, and Reno cocks his head like he can hear it, basking in the success.</p><p>Could it be a cat? Rude had one, Rufus remembers, and nobody ever figured out what happened to it. It lived in Rude’s apartment and wore a perpetual expression of solemn confusion. Anywhere anytime it wasn’t allowed to be, it was there. It slept on keyboards, played in snow, and mutually respected Reno as the scum of the earth. Then the tower collapsed and the Turks never went home again. When Rude and Reno went sight-seeing a year later, they found Rude’s apartment squashed into misshape. They looked through the broken windows and saw no dead spotted cat making an angel in the pulverized silicon. Maybe it was just out of sight, deflated under the bed, or in the tub. Maybe it was a mile away under a different rubble. Or could it be that it was still alive, still going places it shouldn’t?</p><p>There was so much work to do after Meteorfall, so little space in the mind to spare for any death that wasn’t screaming its way into the world right in front of you. But Rude loved that cat. He told stories about it with the solemn confusion of someone who thinks he might have lost something but cannot prove it, not even to himself.</p><p>“Who says we can’t go compound?” Reno mutters. “Devilbeard. Devilsomething.”</p><p>“That’s a pirate,” says Rude, amused.</p><p>With a whuff, Darkstar rests her head on his thigh. <em>Don’t be such a baby, </em>Rufus tells himself. He presses the heel of his hand against his mouth, closes his eyes.</p><p> </p><p>—</p><p> </p><p>It takes him two more days to put good news on his father’s desk, finalize his transfer to Midgar, and finally, cut his own hair like Elena taught him in his bathroom mirror to some reasonable success. That last feat is the closest it gets to genesis. On the morning of the third day, Scarlet slithers through the elevator doors seconds before they close.</p><p>“You sly, sly thing,” she hisses. “What in Odin’s name are you planning?”</p><p>Rufus has always enjoyed Scarlet, he remembers. They are similar in that they work socials to their favor, above and under the table. They speak the same languages: bodies, weapons, the creole that is sex. She is a loathsome facsimile of a person. What is interesting to Rufus is that her brand of cruelty is so camp, it’s reason for second-hand embarrassment across the board. And yet she persists in wearing it. Maybe she’s blind to how it unflatters her—or maybe she’s not, and a bad mask serves her better for reasons he doesn’t know about.</p><p>Today it is ombre lipstick paired with her trademark red dress, as well as an aura of redder delight. “That doesn’t sound very much like gratitude,” Rufus observes.</p><p>“I’ve had many men try to trade in false promises,” she continues, ignoring the tragedy of the business technician caught between them, who is trying just as hard to ignore himself. “I’ll admit, before this week, I thought you among their number. But <em>darling</em>.” She plows the technician aside, stepping right up to Rufus’s face, and he smiles back; the air between their foreheads is charged like a defibrillator. “I must have been a <em>very</em> good girl this year.”</p><p>“Which my father only remembered after I circled your name on his nice list.”</p><p>“Did you for me?”</p><p>“In bright red pen.”</p><p>“My color. Ought we attribute this holiday wonder to the whiteness of a knightly heart, or shall I return you some sort of favor? For instance, I could work wonders on that pretty gun of yours.”</p><p>Amused, he tilts his head. “And which one is that?”</p><p>“You tell me.” Her breath bites of mint and metal. “Whichever needs the attention.”</p><p>The elevator opens on his level. “The one in Junon, then.” He just avoids the snap of her jaws by slipping into the hall. “Poor thing’s been neglected in its mother’s absence.”</p><p>“If only its father could do her job half as well.” This, for some reason, made him want to stop and turn, but she has already caught up to him. “Do quit being stubborn and tell me if we young divorcees have found reason to reconcile.”</p><p>“That’s just pushing it.” A cadet is approaching from down the hall with a tray of coffee. Even on punishment duty, cadets are a rare sight this high up the tower. “Call it a business transaction.” This one has the slim figure of a question mark, but that spiky blond hair is unmistakable. “I’ve wanted to steal Midgar away from you for a while now.” As unmistakable as the hard, quiet look that belongs to twenty-three-year-old Cloud Strife alone.</p><p>
  <em>Oh, fuck.</em>
</p><p>His reaction bucks up against him. With the same energy, he twists the reigns so hard he snaps its head into its neck. “It’s only lucky for you that a legal trade works just as well in my favor,” he tells Scarlet in the meanwhile.</p><p>How is Cloud here? No, Rufus should have expected this. Out of anyone, the mercenary would be the Planet’s natural choice. Can he tell Rufus what happened? Does he<em> know</em> that Rufus remembers? He must, or else he wouldn’t be missile-lining towards them with a stare so intense it is already intimidating his dog. Rufus needs to speak to him. Scarlet laughs and says, “How I detest a man who only courts me for my capital.”</p><p>“But you’ll buy into it.” Rufus stops and faces her. She is ignoring the direction to exit stage left.</p><p>“Not the man. The gun, maybe. Depending on the size. Oh, <em>pardon</em> my phrasing.”</p><p>“I forgive you.” That irritates her nicely<em>. </em>“Now remind me which floor your department—”</p><p>There is a blur and a dark flash in his periphery, but Rufus’s reflexes are faster. He steps out of range of the coffee splash unfurling in the air, hears Scarlet’s shriek and the tray’s clatter, sees Darkstar lunge forward, tossing Cloud into the air like a doll.</p><p>Rufus’s back foot clicks against the floor, and everything else clicks with it.</p><p>Cloud Strife, hero of Gaia, believed that spilling a tray of hot coffee over the vice-president’s white suit would be an appropriate method of getting Rufus’s attention.</p><p>Coffee splatters the floor.</p><p>Someday, Rufus imagines, when he is twice dead and so is Shinra’s legacy, the Planet will come to him and ask, <em>how were you</em> <em>the least idiotic of all my champions? </em>And he will reply, <em>I have a joint degree in risk management and dramaturgy. </em>And then they will forgive each other for the years of malevolent neglect, and finally they will be on good terms.</p><p>“D, off.” Cloud tries to scramble to his feet, but Rufus kicks him in the side. Not really with any force; more the kind of hooking maneuver that flips a football over. It is so easy to do—the man being so light and flippable—that Rufus’s mind instantly re-contextualizes Cloud Strife as a boy. He presses the heel of his boot into the boy’s shoulder and meets wide pale blue eyes that are searching for a thirty-three-year-old ghost.</p><p>Cloud is looking in the right place, but the wrong time. Right now, Rufus’s face is an execution block. “And just what do you think you’re doing?”</p><p>Cloud’s heart is pounding so hard, Rufus can feel it through his boot. “I’m very sorry, sir.” Meanwhile his eyes storm cabinets, toss bedsheets, rattle boxes listening for a voice in them. “I wasn’t looking where I was going, I just—”</p><p>Rufus screws his foot in, conscious of every head in the hallway turned towards them. Cloud’s jaw clenches not out of pain. “You have some nerve,” he says, watching some wild spark splutter and fade in the boy’s eyes, “to think any assault on the future president of this company can be excused with an apology as pathetic as yourself. Didn’t like your prospects in the army? You might as well have just ended it all.”</p><p>Like a penniless automaton, Cloud’s limbs go limp one by one. He looks so miserable, Rufus wants to laugh, to tease, <em>Am I so precious to misplace?</em> “I’m sorry, sir.”</p><p>“Scar his face while you’re firing him,” Scarlet sneers. “He could have ruined these shoes for good.”</p><p>And there is another reason to like her: for the generous opportunities she provides. A philanthropist, is Director Scarlet. “Oh. Well.” He steps off of Cloud and, still unsheathed, turns against her. “Suddenly I’m no longer in the mood.”</p><p>She scowls, a childish scrunch. She dislikes a traitorous weapon. “What, like I can’t enjoy myself?”</p><p>“It’s not a good look on you.” Rufus kicks the coffee tray into Cloud’s thigh. “You, refill this.”</p><p>Cloud stands, takes it, and mopes over to the break room. Scarlet eyes the pool of coffee a moment longer before placing Rufus under the same lens. “Wave your handkerchief at the harbor all you want, darling. You know I’ll be back.”</p><p>He just smiles. With a click of her tongue, she leaves towards the elevator.</p><p>Time is a window just wide enough for Rufus to follow Cloud to one of the pantry-sized break rooms. Cloud is squeezing a medium roast out of his acrylic shirt into the sink. Glancing up at the sound of people hastily clearing Rufus’s path, he goes grim at the sight.</p><p>It is actually quite satisfying. Rufus never had this effect on Cloud in the future. He probably never will again. “Oh, you thought I was done with you.” He backs the boy up until there’s nowhere to go but into the wall. “That’s cute.”</p><p>“Sir, I—” Cloud’s gaze flutters everywhere before landing on Rufus’s collar. “I swear it won’t happen again.”</p><p>“Good.” Everybody in the lounge behind them has fled. He leans in. “Because we don’t have much time. Cloud Strife, what are you doing here?”</p><p>Cloud’s shock is so vibrant, Rufus contemplates turning off the lights and shutting the door. But that might be too much. “It <em>is</em> you? Shit, I almost thought—”</p><p>“Keep your voice <em>down.</em> And act scared. I’m currently taking my anger out on the cadet who almost trashed my suit, which means I’m most likely threatening the lives of your friends and family for the pleasure of it. Do you understand? This conversation isn’t happening.”</p><p>A whole flock of emotions flits through Cloud’s face, but dammit, this is not migration season. “You realize that cover is only realistic if you’re the biggest asshole on the Planet—”</p><p>
  <em>“What happened?”</em>
</p><p>“It was Aerith. She sent us back. Well, she needed <em>you</em>.”</p><p>“Aerith Gainsborough?” he asks. “<em>Needed</em> me?”</p><p>“I know, look, it’s all fucked up, I don’t know if—” Cloud’s exhale is explosive. “Listen. You need to talk to her.”</p><p>Rufus frowns. “As if you haven’t?”</p><p>“No, <em>you</em>. She wants to talk to <em>you</em>.” Rufus doesn’t like that at all. “Can you meet her? She’s in the Sector 5 slums—”</p><p>“Near an old church, yes, the Turks know.” But getting below the plate somehow, from this high up the tower? It would take flawless footwork. He doesn’t know if he can do it. He would need a plan. “I might have to get wasted.”</p><p>“You might—<em>what?”</em></p><p>“I’m thinking.” The girl can give him answers. In that case, he will risk it, set up his own fall. “Can she meet me in Wall Market? Tonight?”</p><p>“Wall Market, <em>really?”</em></p><p>“It’s that or it’s nothing.”</p><p>“I mean, I can message her—”</p><p>“Then do. Besides you, myself, and her, who knows about all this?”</p><p>Cloud grimaces, which says a whole host of terrible things. “Did you tell anyone?” asks Rufus. “Or are there others?” The boy bites something back. “Cloud, try to give me something to work with here.”</p><p>All that gets him is a flare. “Sorry to be trapped in the smallest room in the world with the guy who was just kicking me around and fucking <em>stepping</em> on me<em>—”</em></p><p>“And whose plan was it that I had to salvage?” But Rufus leans back. Cloud’s awful spidery grip on the wall eases up, though his glare does not. This had better not be the mercenary’s idea of looking terrified. “You, myself, Aerith Gainsborough. Is there anyone else who remembers the future?”</p><p>“Yes,” says Cloud. Then his gaze flicks behind Rufus’s back, and empties out.</p><p>As much as Rufus wants to believe that Cloud has miraculously learned how to act, he also knows genuine fear when he sees it. Someone is coming up from behind them and given Cloud’s reaction, Rufus had a rather damnable suspicion as to “Who?” he hisses, but Cloud is gone. So he switches vocal tracks entirely. “And next time you decide to step foot on the upper floors, my hound will be more than happy to hunt you down in my stead. Pray to any god that your memory of this lesson is half as good as hers—”</p><p>“Mr. Vice-President.”</p><p>A long shadow has fallen over them. <em>Drama and fanfare</em>, Rufus thinks. <em>It’s all anyone knows. </em>He rolls his shoulders back, tosses his hair, and cast a last look down at the vacancy left within the body of Cloud Strife. The body’s hands are bloodless fists.</p><p>Rufus turns to smile at the commander.</p><p>Not counting the blaze of a torso encased in ice, Rufus remembers Sephiroth only in fragments. A black wing muscling skyward. The elegant panther bulk of him. Green eyes that pierced Rufus through and saw a paradise beyond the puncture. A smile for that place.</p><p>Now, it is like Sephiroth is being puppeted by a bad animator. The presentation is cold and blank. The eyes can’t even break skin. “I understand that your recent promotion has provided you with new authorities,” says this alien personality. “However, I do not believe that intimidating members of Public Security’s newest cohort in the workplace is one of them.”</p><p>Or maybe Rufus’s skin has grown thicker. “You’re going quite out of your way,” he counters, “for a bad item that fell off the shelf.”</p><p>“I enforce the chain of command, sir. Any punishment this young man receives for his mistakes will be meted out by his direct superiors.” Sephiroth’s gaze locks onto Cloud without recognition. “You’re with me, Private.”</p><p>Nobody takes the cue. Not even Rufus moves, and he doesn’t know why; he has no other option but to let this moment go, and still he digs his nails into it. He cannot stop thinking of Cloud’s fists, tiny and pale and useless as rolled-up paper balls.</p><p>“Sir,” says Cloud at last, in a voice like the absolute north. He has straightened against the wall, and now he turns his head towards Rufus without meeting his gaze. “Mr. Vice-President.”</p><p>He looks like he is in hell.</p><p>But at least that’s nearby. “Private,” says Rufus.</p><p>They all move—Rufus backs up, Cloud steps past, Sephiroth steps away—as if it’s practiced choreography. “Excuse us,” says the commander.</p><p>The two leave the lounge, take a right turn down the hallway, and disappear. Rufus is immediately disturbed. Object permanence activates at a lower rate than this company advertises, and Cloud Strife has always been something of an outlier. It will be a miracle if the mercenary does not die trying to kill the commander in the next twenty-four hours. Even then, Rufus will have to ration out that blessing.</p><p>What disturbs him even more is his hesitation just then. It seems he will need Cloud to survive now more than ever before. Apparently all Cloud has to do is vanish into his psyche, and that is enough to send Rufus into a state. It’s not an ideal development. With this new power the boy holds over him, which one of them is the actual liability?</p><p>He calls for Darkstar and she trots over from the other side of the lounge. She was in position to attack the general from behind at his command. Rufus should teach her to pick her battles, but that would just be hypocritical. His plans to kill the man have only been postponed in favor of the more pressing matter of meeting Aerith Gainsborough. “Alright, D.”</p><p>Darkstar chuffs, her feeler rippling like an eel. She is saying, you’d better have the spirit for work.</p><p> </p><p>—</p><p> </p><p>There are several people in Rufus’s repertoire who can reliably hit him up with enough drugs and alcohol to get him borderline manic and thus believably unaccountable for all his actions. At 6PM he goes to a black-tie dinner as the plus-one for Cardina Zeon, daughter of some underwriting tycoon from Mideel and one of those very reliable people. Like him, she is a moneyed heiress who runs a social business and is tactically ruining her whole life.</p><p>Well, <em>his</em> ruin is not nearly as intentional, Rufus thinks at around 8PM midway through texting Tseng. He has around thirty milligrams of pastel circulating in his bloodstream combined with whatever the hell his BAC is, which means he can look up at the sea of chandeliers shimmering above this curtained-off plush sofa and reenact man’s discovery of fire over and over. Behind the partition, a waiter is doing parlor tricks with a 52-deck and his audience, a girl glossed out in peacock dress and pearl, keeps asking him to tell her her future. Rufus can hear her saying <em>so what’s that spade gonna do for me?</em> and yet he can’t seem to recall having made a single good decision in his life.</p><p>Fighting the Weapons, trying to rebuild Shinra, trying to unbuild it, fighting to try. And now this, his tangled plan to rendezvous with the flower girl without raising anyone’s suspicions. Isn’t the effort already doomed? As everything else was doomed? On the table is a gooey pill sitting cutely next to a sweating shot of vodka. Rufus is capable of being mindful of his own intoxication levels, but he completely forgot that getting drugged up a little tends to make a person want to get drugged up a lot. To cope with his negligent stupidity, he could load that pill into the back of a black-out and play roulette. And why not do that instead? There were plenty of times in Rufus’s life when his sole purpose for taking anything was to forget his life like his life depended on it, simpler times that maybe he should go back to.</p><p>Oh, but that’s right—you can’t turn back time. Time is not a line or a circle but a downward spiral, a screw you aren’t supposed to loosen, which is another way of saying he is going to lose his damn mind before he even considers letting Aerith Gainsborough enjoy her own little night out in Wall Market. “Is that mine?” asks Cardina from the other end of the couch.</p><p>It registers to him that he’s finished and sent the text—when? <em>How?</em>—and now Tseng is calling him. His PHS is already on the third ring. “It’s mine.” He picks up. “Hi.”</p><p><em>“Sir, I have to advise against this. Given that you are a figure of significant import in this company,” </em>and here the comma is visible, “<em>and are more likely than not intoxicated—”</em></p><p>“Relax, it’s one night of fun. My lady’s flying back to her family tomorrow and she wants a fond memory of the city as a parting gift.” Wispy hair hovering out of her skein, Cardina raises her shot glass in his direction. He raises his eyebrows back.</p><p>Tseng goes on about something something criminal activity sighting potential scandal. It feels like half of Rufus’s hearing is underwater and the other half submerged in the loveliest music he’s ever heard. He should act like he’s comprehending speech. “Mm,” he says.</p><p>He hears the dull thud of Tseng dropping his current argument.<em> “Sir, at the very least, there are a number of brothels above the plate that you may find satisfactory.”</em></p><p>“I’ve thought of that.” The back of his teeth tastes like what he always imagined rosin would taste like: a honey tack coated with what he always imagined plaster would taste like. “They just don’t have the same flavor.”</p><p>“Tell him I like it dirty,” says Cardina.</p><p><em>“I recommend,” </em>says Tseng,<em> “that you compromise.”</em></p><p>Tseng’s tone is such a delight that Rufus almost doesn’t do what he needs to do, which is to put metal under his tongue. “Is that what your director told my father on his last worldwide tour? To compromise? I’m sure he did. I’m sure he fucked only half the women in Gongaga and Nibelheim, unlike in Midgar where every whore still surviving on an instinct for self-preservation he’s given reason to keep their mouth shut.” Cardina cackles, and Rufus leans forward in the act. “Get the car, Tseng. Play smart.”</p><p><em>“Yes, sir,”</em> says the void.</p><p>At 9PM they pull up in the back lot of the Honey Bee Inn, Cardina’s limbs sloshing over his. Neon signage streams over their shoulders. The Turks and Cardina’s men rise like undertakers out of their black cars. They are greeted by polite, cheerful people who are pretending that the legal responsibility for tonight is not hanging over them like a guillotine. The owner of the inn, not yet Rhodea, believes that if he stands very still he will not be seen, but any subtle reverberation in the Tseng’s mood makes him skitter. The nervous spider leads Rufus and Cardina inside.</p><p>Rude, Reno, and Tseng follow them, although Rufus is not nearly sober enough to look at their faces. They go down the hall, up the stairs, and onto the VIP balcony, where they have a view of the evening club in full swing.</p><p>It is like looking into the inside of a raw beating heart. The glare is so pink that color does not exist. Instead there are silhouettes, eclipses. The dancers on-stage are skilled, and so are the workers in the audience; they unzip the air wherever they walk and a dozen lines of sight cross-stitch it back up.</p><p>Some of them are giving out small inscrutable gifts from a basket, presumably to their good tippers. A manager hands one to Rufus per courtesy. “Hang on,” says Reno. “Aren’t those—?” He cuts himself off.</p><p>It’s a flower, a curling star shape with tough, water-fed stem. Between his fingers its petals are soft as chocobo down. “This is real,” Rufus realizes.</p><p>He feels, but does not see, each individual gear in the Turks’ clockwork grind to a halt. Time must have stopped for them. He could envy that. “It’s a rare thing,” the manager agrees. “Some kid was selling them on the street today, so we paid her a pretty coin for a bundle. ‘Symbols of lovers reunited’, she called them. Isn’t that romantic?”</p><p>“Street vendors down here, growing flowers?” Cardina is appalled.</p><p>If Tseng tenses up any further, he will snap like a cord and bring the whole set down with him. Rufus tries to remember his own lines. He wraps an arm around Cardina and speaks to the back of her head. “They could have just shipped them in, but I’m sure they’d love it if people like you would start opening their purses around their friendly local neighborhood.” She gasps, and then coos: poor people and their <em>communities!</em> “The real mystery is how they knew that you open up so <em>eagerly</em>—”</p><p>“Rufus!” She smacks his forehead, and he releases her, disoriented. The flower falls an impossible depth. “I thought you said you wanted separate rooms!”</p><p>“I do. So hurry up and take first pick.”</p><p>Cardina finds one her type, a dancer with a long whip of hair and plush padding around the ribs. Meanwhile Rufus picks out a woman serving drinks to the back tables. She has an older walk, is slow to smile, is not afraid to accept a cigarette from another man’s hand and blow an O into his chin, which is all to say that she strikes him as someone who won’t fear a surprise.</p><p>He waits for the managers to “prepare” her, meaning that they must remind her, in hushed voices, of her position. Service the vice-president well and you will earn more than a month’s pay in a single night. Service him poorly and you will be dragged into the back alley and shot. An existential crisis will only hold you up; your date with destiny comes first, but don’t call him that.</p><p>The others always said that Rufus would make a good Turk, but now that he thinks about it, Wall Market sex work would suit him well, if not better. The prepared woman weaves her way up the balcony. “Hi,” she says, her voice dipping into some sort of chocolate. “My name’s Argent.”</p><p>Rufus forgets that. They will never see each other again after this. “I’d tell you mine, but—” He tugs his face mask down. “I’m sure you know it already.”</p><p>“Sure, I’ve seen that face on the telly. But maybe you can give me a more…proper introduction.” She leads him down a smoky hall, towards the room of his tactical request. Reno follows them to play sentinel outside the door. To Reno she says, “You’re outta luck. This one’s got no peephole.”</p><p>“We’re good, lady,” Reno replies. He does not look at them. Right before entering the room, Rufus sees him flick his right hand to the velvet floor like he’s shaking blood off of it: disgust.</p><p><em>Don’t, </em>Rufus thinks, helplessly.</p><p>The door closes.</p><p>“Well, Mr. Vice-President,” says the woman, who has probably never once breathed clean air or ran her feet through a wet green ground. Next door, Cardina Zeon is fully engaged in the corporate tradition. She is slumming. She is rubbing dead skin cells off her poor prostitute and smearing them onto herself with glee, just so she can watch them swirl down the shower drain next morning and bask in the relief. The real afterglow is in knowing that the worst, for you, has passed.</p><p>“Rufus,” he says.</p><p>“Rufus,” she repeats.</p><p>He kisses her. They drink dive into each other’s mouths; he tastes ash, a bitter pill coating, garlic from whatever she ate before. Her legs hit the back of the bed, toppling them into a silk comforter below a canopy of fleurs-de-lys. Finally, he comes up for air out of the dark flood of her pupil and says, “Now, if all goes to plan, here’s what we’re going to do.”</p><p>“Well,” she breathes, “aren’t you methodical?”</p><p>“Are you listening?”</p><p>“Oh, yes.”</p><p>“As much as I would love to have my way with you for the next couple of hours,” as he unravels her fingers around the knot of his tie, “I am going to climb out of the window, eventually straight down to hell, and you are not going to say a word.”</p><p>“What?” she asks, still panting.</p><p>That is one too many words. Rufus hooks two fingers under the strap along her collarbone and pulls her flush upright against his chest. “Sometimes I like going on little adventures without the accompaniment of my father’s men. You saw those suits outside?” She nods. “This is one of those times.”</p><p>Her breathing calms. She unravels their bodies and sits back against a dragon’s hoard of cushions. He would stare too, if he opened his front door expecting a package delivery and found the circus on his porch. “You want to sneak out,” she says.</p><p>“Yeah."</p><p>"Of the inn."</p><p>"Where else, yes."</p><p>“Without your gang of bodyguards behind you.”</p><p>“Technically I’ve paid for you, this room, and the window to this room. So I can do whatever I like with all three.” He rises a little unsteadily from the bed.</p><p>“Holy shit,” says the woman. She reaches over to the bedside table and fishes a pack of cigarettes out of the drawer. “Who knew Rufus Shinra was a <em>real</em> wild kind?”</p><p>Rufus’s fingers beat hers to the lighter hiding in the back corner. “Nobody but you.” He lights the end of the cigarette between her lips. “I’m sure you know what happens if you ever decide to change that.”</p><p>“I got the university lecture on it.” Enraptured by the lion parading the ring, she watches him unscrew the canteen of water on the table. Next to it is an aesthetic arrangement of the trademarked olden days: a handset, a tape recorder, a melamine bowl of rubbers in candy-plastic seals. He drinks because he expects hydration to help, but he is already mostly sober. The blood that Reno saw on his glove might as well have splattered across Rufus’s face.</p><p>Still, for good measure, he casts Poisona from his wrist. It feels like diver’s decompression. He can look forward to cursing himself out in the morning. “Won’t I get in trouble if you hurt yourself?” asks the woman. “As capable as you look, that drop is known to break bones.”</p><p>“If this night does somehow end up with me in a hospital—which would be hilarious, by the way—you could probably just tell my father I’m into that sort of thing.” He takes off his coat and tosses it to her.</p><p>She catches it laughing. “Sure, I won’t get killed for that one.”</p><p>“Everyone would believe you.” He goes to the window, unlatches it, slides it open. Night under the plate is as warm as day above it. “But you talk like someone’s actually done this before.” He pops off the mesh screen.</p><p>“One of our girls, once. Drank her whole body weight and threw herself off. Never a client, though—can you imagine the embarrassment?”</p><p>Rufus tests the sill with his foot. “I imagine the landing hurt like sticks and stones.” This building isn’t nearly tall enough for that particular business.</p><p>“Words, too. Angel of Jailbird Ave, we called her.” As he folds his black cuffs to the elbow, her smoke rolls over him. The woman has draped his coat over her shoulders like a cape. Sitting there on that silk four-poster bed, her legs folded like rosebuds, she looks as comfortable as a queen, and happy as a cat with how he tightens the buckle of his rifle holster around his thigh. “I doubt she ever made for as pretty a fall as you.”</p><p>“Now, now.” He pulls his mask over his smile. “This one flies.”</p><p>He hops over the sill.</p><p>The pipes are as scabbed as stonework, which helps with his grip. Above him, the woman turns on the tape, and Sahle Mana starts singing “Peace Dance” to a brass orchestra. It is originally a Wutaian song, but once translated from dialect and filtered through a shiny-faced R&amp;B singer from Corel, anything can be forgiven. <em>“I taught a kid to build a kite,” </em>he hears as he descends, <em>“I gave a woman an umbrella even though I had pneumonia, I stopped the revolution before it reached the town, and I loved you in the lamplight, in a pretty gown…”</em></p><p>Rufus lands in the alley, in a shadow as deep as the inside of a magician’s hat. Not a single thing blinks back at him. <em>Safe,</em> Rufus thinks.</p><p>Tseng’s tenor floats toward him.</p><p><em>Ah, shit.</em> From here Rufus can see Tseng’s silhouette, a strict outline next to one of Cardina’s bodyguards; Tseng must be asking them to rearrange positions. So he wants to hunt down Aerith Gainsborough as well? That’s understandable. Rufus will just have to beat him to it.</p><p>As the bodyguard turns to head back into the inn, and Tseng pivots to watch his leaving, Rufus slips into the shadow of the city.</p><p>The streets are packing a lawless kind of laughter, and a few storefronts are still ballooning with New Year’s merchandise. A new delicious smell emerges every half-block. Someone has left a hooded jacket flapping on the railing of a staircase leading down to a dive bar, and he grabs it as a disguise. He can hear his heartbeat in his blood in his ears. Where would a scrap of a flower girl be among these crowds?</p><p><em>Follow them, </em>he thinks.<em> The yellow flowers.</em></p><p>In little ways they’re everywhere: one bow-tied to a waffle stand, one drooping behind a man’s ear, more peeking out of a set of high heels left neatly on the hood of a car. A clutch of them crackles on the hot counter of a diner. Petals collected by the wind shiver in a crack in the asphalt. They are starting to become the only thing he can see. He stops people who are flowering out of their pockets—who did this to you?—and they point him further down and down the district—that girl, that girl.</p><p>He finds her basket first. Tipped onto its side, a feast of flowers spill shamelessly out onto the ground. The wind has been picking them off one by one and tumbleweeding them into the main street.</p><p>She is standing in the middle of the alley, not facing him. It looks as if she is staring down the burrowing tunnel that lies ahead of her, but Rufus can’t see anything at all. Only the narrow clicking quiet.</p><p>He steps forward. His footfall is sharp, but the girl does not hear it. Is she breathing? What is this?</p><p>“Ms. Gainsborough,” he tries.</p><p>“Oh!” Suddenly Rufus is staring into round green headlights of eyes. She beams at him. “Well, well, well. If it isn’t Mr. Shinra.”</p><p>“Everything all right?”</p><p>“Yeah, why?” asks the flower girl. <em>Bizarre.</em> Then she sees the basket of flowers and says, insightfully, “My flowers!”</p><p>He catches her arm on its way down to them. “They’ll only trace back to you now, I'm afraid.”</p><p>“Uh-oh. Did Tseng and the others find out that I’m here?” Her good humor is a surprise. He forgets that this is Tseng’s girl; she instinctively resists. “Still, I don’t want these to wilt and die here without ever being appreciated by anyone.” She kneels despite his grip, and he almost mindlessly goes down with her. “Look! They’re too pretty for that, don’t you think?”</p><p>They are that.</p><p>He kneels down to help and thinks about how wonderful it is to have working legs and kneecaps that will not declare war against him until two years from now, the second he turns twenty-five. Each bloom is so delicate, he doesn’t think he has ever put less force into his hands. “The only reason Tseng caught wind of you at all is because the Honey Bee Inn made your wares their downstairs centerpiece.”</p><p>“Huh! Well, I’m glad to have found fellow flower-lovers and customers. I really didn’t expect such good business in Wall Market. Hopefully that’ll make tonight up to my mom—she’ll be furious when she figures out where exactly I’ve sneaked off to.”</p><p>It is good to know they have both taken risks. “As she should be. Some districts are dangerous for a girl.” He looks up, and so does she. Their fingers are sticky with flower skin. “But you don’t act like you’re in danger, Ms. Gainsborough.”</p><p>Grinning, she hoists the revitalized basket over her shoulder. “I’m a lot tougher than I look.” She offers him a hand.</p><p>He takes it.</p><p>And he knows, in the marrow of him. “It was you.”</p><p>“Yep,” she says. “It was me.”</p><p>With surprising strength, she pulls him to his feet.</p><p>The girl leads him up a set of stairs, onto the rattling iron walkways between the rooftops. Tasseled bulb lanterns sway beneath the rusted reinforcements. The occasional petal drifts from her basket. Rufus can only hope that Tseng won’t pick up the trail; it might seem unlikely, but even if he weren’t good at his job, Tseng has always had a sense for the girl.</p><p>She stops at a small outlook that is being used for someone’s storage space. It is canopied with fake curry leaves. A lucky cat the size of Darkstar lies on its back and waves, marbleized with grime. “Nowhere in Wall Market is as private as the church is,” she says, straightening and stretching her arms on the railing. “Still, I think it’s peaceful here.”</p><p>Rufus pulls down his mask and lets her take her moment. She is wearing a pink dress that looks soft, simple boots that match her hair, a white hair ribbon. She carries herself firmly and with ease, as if herself is a light burden. Her mother died when she was young. She can’t be older than fifteen or sixteen, although the eyes have a decade on the rest of her. Like blossoms, they are opened from the inside-out. Like Cloud, they are searching him for something.</p><p>But for what? It feels like it's been a long time since Rufus hasn't known what someone wanted. Kylegate wanted power, so he presented powerlessness. Kilmister wanted thrill, so he presented intrigue. The Turks want each other, so he presents reasons worthy of their unifying contempt. His father wants an animal.</p><p>And now this flower girl. What does she want? Which wooden creature can Rufus roll up to her gates and have it be accepted into the city? “You must have spoken to Cloud in the church,” he says.</p><p>“That’s right. You know, the first thing Cloud did after arriving in Midgar was to come visit me. To be honest I thought he would take his time…maybe spend a little more of it with his mom. He got a little angry when I said that.”</p><p>In what world would he not be? Cloud's mother died in the fires of Nibelheim. “He told me that you requested this meeting. That you wanted to see me, in person.”</p><p>“Yes.” She turns to face him. Her back is ramrod straight. “I did.”</p><p>“And why,” he asks, “is that?”</p><p>“Because if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that you deserve to be told the truth by someone who will look you in the eyes when they tell it to you. That’s what everyone deserves.”</p><p>What a comfortless answer. Rufus is intrigued. “And is that what you have for me? The truth?”</p><p>“Not all of it. Just my own story, for whatever it’s worth.” She smiles, obviously afraid. “Pretty weird way to start one, I know.” There is a slight twist at the corner of her mouth. What is Rufus missing?</p><p>Then he sees. She is afraid of <em>him.</em></p><p>Well, prying open a person’s fears is the quickest route to learning them. And Rufus knows how to wear the claws and fangs necessary for the job under a beautiful smooth pelt, and say, in a voice velvet as any threat, “And yet you’ve already begun.”</p><p>“Yes.” She takes a deep breath. “So.”</p><p>Aerith Gainsborough died beneath the Forgotten City with Sephiroth’s sword speared through her chest.</p><p>She plunged into the Lifestream, the immortal metaphysical matter that fabricates the Planet’s lifeblood and susurrates with the abstracted energies of all things that have or will have lived. Language cannot adequately describe it, as it surpasses all concepts of sensation.</p><p>The mind, approximating, remembers water.</p><p>Most things upon death dissolved into its great flow, but not her. She had no body and yet, like a message in a bottle, contained multitudes: a name, memories, synaptic echoes of what she loved and hated and feared and revered. She wondered where the Lifestream’s undulations would take her.<em> Let go, </em>said the endless souls, <em>and you will understand.</em></p><p>She thought of Cloud and said, Not yet.</p><p>When Sephiroth died, his soul was burning. He splintered the waves and tunneled through thickening water, all his skeletons massed together. <em>You are no child of mine, </em>said the Lifestream<em>.</em> <em>And you, no mother, </em>he said. He unlocked his many limbs and spilled darkness into the valves of the Planet’s very heart, for it was his desire, even in death, to realize Jenova’s dream.</p><p>And so the beginning of Geostigma.</p><p>“That easily?” asks Rufus, although he does not know what he expected. A war, maybe. A little bit of good death in the universe. Watching mothers and fathers lever buildings out of Midgar’s dust to make room for the smallest of graves, he often thought that their labor deserved compensation.</p><p>“Well, just think of it like…an oil spill. All you have to do is tip the barrels over, and the whole ocean—”</p><p>“I know oil spills.” Before the mako reactors were built, Shinra covered up many in their time. Activists raged against the waves of drowned birds that had raged against the waves. “Continue.”</p><p>In Meteor’s wake, the Lifestream seeped through the Planet’s surface like a serum for its blisters. Its intention was to heal. Mixed through with darkness, it killed all that it touched. The souls of the Geostigmatic were the dyed ones, and the Lifestream could sense their bad blood. It said, <em>you are no children of mine.</em></p><p>So their souls joined the darkness that had marked them as her own, and the darkness grew as heavy and loud and everywhere as the water.</p><p>“What did that mean for those people, the Geostigmatic?”</p><p>“I guess Jenova got to keep them. To make a river of her own.”</p><p>“To do what with?”</p><p>“I don’t know. She was just…spreading, like a disease.”</p><p>What could Aerith Gainsborough do to help them? One by one, she lifted the Geostigmatic souls from the Lifestream’s lightless depths and washed them clean. Yet for each one she saved, a hundred more sprayed the water, billowing ink. Her time was too little, the task at hand too great. She knew what this meant for the people she had left behind: extinction.</p><p>“Extinction?” he repeats, if only to hear the word snap a second clean break through the world.</p><p>“I could purify the souls that passed on, but I couldn’t save the living. And they were dying so fast.”</p><p>“So really, you couldn’t save anything.”</p><p>“No,” she says. “Not that way.”</p><p>Fearing what was to come, she asked the Planet how to save them. It could offer no solution. <em>Fear is for living hearts only,</em> it replied. <em>Join me and understand.</em></p><p>She thought of Cloud’s heart and said, I cannot.</p><p>Cloud struck down Sephiroth and his Remnants, smashing their wings against the earth. She felt the reverberations from below. In that moment, as Sephiroth returned to ash and took Jenova’s head with him, Aerith felt the darkness part for her. She sensed that her power, the Great Gospel, could wash Geostigma away. The sky was just wide enough for a halo of rain over Edge and Midgar. She imagined the rain falling through the people, rinsing their bodies of black matter, filling their mouths with crisp light.</p><p>It would take all of her remaining power to do this. The cost would break her, and Aerith Gainsborough would be subsumed by the Planet at last. <em>So break,</em> said the Cetra, <em>and understand.</em></p><p>She thought of Cloud’s time.</p><p>She knew that Geostigma was caused by the Lifestream’s pollution. That the only way to stop it once and for all was to clean up the darkness that Sephiroth had released. That the the spirits of the Cetra could do this by purifying the corrupted souls of the dead. And yet, still, it would have taken too long. So many centuries.</p><p>“What are you saying?”</p><p>By the time the Lifestream was clean again, it would already be too late for humanity.</p><p>“You’re saying that you could have cured Geostigma in Edge, and chose not to.”</p><p>She needed to find another way. What she needed instead—</p><p>“Cloud died of that disease,” he says.</p><p>Yes.</p><p>“As did thousands upon thousands of people. You said you wanted to save them.”</p><p>Everyone dies eventually.</p><p>“How can you—?”</p><p>“That’s what the Planet told me,” she says. “We are all destined to join the Lifestream, it said. One way or another, we will find our rightful place in the cycle of life and death.” The girl shakes her head minutely, the way he has seen people do when you give them the news: <em>there was nothing we could do</em>. The great horror of it is replaying itself around her. Like Cloud, she is no longer with him. “Maybe the Planet couldn’t do anything, at that point. Or maybe it just…wouldn’t.”</p><p>Suddenly Rufus is furious. He needs her <em>here. “Explain</em> yourself, damn you.”</p><p>“I’m saying—” Her anguish rears up. “Nothing would have changed! If I had brought down that rain, the people of Edge would have been cured for a little while. A few years, maybe more. But then it would have started again.” Rufus shakes his head. “The contamination. The sickness. The spread.”</p><p>“You didn’t think it would be worth it.”</p><p>“There had to be something else I could do. Something more.”</p><p>“It still could have been,” he says. “Worthwhile.”</p><p>“It wouldn’t have saved anyone!” she cries. “Don’t you see that?”</p><p>All Rufus remembers seeing is how heavy it was: not the sky that day the Remnants died—when Cloud staggered upright, blood and black ichor spliced down his clothes—but the raft Rufus slung together out of wooden bedframes when rain flooded Kilmister's caves. The rain stopped when they were inches under the reach of Kilmister’s ladder, so he tried lunging for it. He scraped his arms bloody against the stones. Like Judd, Pamela, and Imran, he clung to wood, barely alive. The Turks were not coming. Cold clear water lapped under his arms and the clouds were so swollen with his hopes, they looked painful to the touch. <em>Just a little more. Please. Anything. </em>He saw them roil with bright, shifting light and believed that someone was there. <em>I’m down here. I’ll do anything. I’m begging you.</em></p><p>But he looked back down at where he was, only Judd and Pamela were with him. Where was Imran? It was like a magic trick—he was there, he was just there—until Rufus’s slow, soggy mind understood. Imran’s body was so brittled out by Geostigma that his letting go had had no impact on the buoyancy of the raft.</p><p>The man had sunk into the dark, silent and small. He is still sinking.</p><p>“You’d have had to watch, again, as everyone around you started to die,” says the girl. “I couldn’t do it. He would have lost Denzel all over again. If not him, then Tifa, Barret, Marlene. He said it would’ve been better, but how?” The word is like a broken little body she drops to his feet.</p><p>Rufus just looks at her. He doesn’t know what he is supposed to do with this. “How could I have done that to him?” she whispers.</p><p>Distantly, he is aware that she couldn’t have. He is still in the process of rationalizing that her choices were made out of love. He has not yet accepted that he would have done the same in her shoes, because he is thinking of a different sky, a sky she wasn’t even looking down from, a sky to which he prayed and she did not hear him. “It might not have been complete extinction. Some of us could have survived. As your mother did.”</p><p>“That’s not <em>living.”</em> Her voice shakes so hard it could fall apart. “That’s not <em>alive.”</em></p><p>And how can he argue with that? It was her mother. She would know. “No, maybe not, but—” Anything would have been better. He is only realizing this now, thanks to the girl whose life Tseng kept closer to him than his heart. Her death, too. One day faraway from any anniversary, Rufus heard Tseng humming while washing fresh Kalm lettuce in the sink, and sneak-sprinted off to Rude to deliver bewildered earwitness testimony. He used to do that all the time, Rude said. He even sang. The flower girl loved that, when they were young.</p><p>Killing is a petty crime. Imagine taking the music out of a person.</p><p>But that is nothing compared to what Rufus has done. He didn’t know it at the time, but, alive, Rufus Shinra was someone the Turks could walk away from. Whether they did or not was irrelevant, because what mattered was that they <em>could—</em>put the guns down, find new jobs, live brighter lives. If they did, it would be making more of themselves than the dogs Shinra had chained to the back of the house. If they didn’t, it was just because they liked the view from the yard. That was what Rufus gave them in life: the hope that, at any moment, they could love themselves enough.</p><p>In dying, Rufus made them surrender.</p><p>“You have to understand,” he says, and the next words slip his grasp, translucent. What is there to understand? Tseng scrubbed black stains out of the bathroom floor for hours. Tseng feigned deafness as Rufus screamed at him to leave, because where else was there to go? Shinra had taken everything else from him. <em>Rufus </em>had done that. Taken everything from him.</p><p>Tseng stayed at his employer’s side until the bitter end. Where was his compensation?</p><p>Rufus feels the way he felt when the Turks pulled him and Judd up Kilmister’s ladder: heavy and empty all at once, a cold clutch to his thoughts. “You would have given us more time,” he says. It’s not enough.</p><p>“I already have," says the girl, shaking.</p><p>Several plazas away, someone’s leftover New Year’s fireworks are pinching the air. They bloom behind her ear in every color.</p><p>“Is that so,” he says.</p><p>Aerith Gainsborough was afraid of the end and that is why she clung to herself as the shadows of this story shifted in the water. Why did her loved ones have to die? she asked. <em>Everyone dies, </em>said the waves<em>. </em>Not like this. <em>Love is for living hearts only.</em> And yet her thoughts and feelings were so fierce that the Lifestream began to ripple around her. She did not understand how the Planet could accept this, so she asked: How can you accept this?</p><p>
  <em>I have lost the battle and yet won the war.</em>
</p><p>“The battle, meaning humanity’s downfall?” Rufus’s thoughts are swimming. “Then what is the war?”</p><p>“I think…the one between the Planet and Jenova.”</p><p>“But then the war was lost. Jenova brought about our extinction. You said it yourself.”</p><p>“Yeah, but I don’t think that was her <em>goal </em>goal. She must have wanted something more, and never got it.”</p><p>“More how? Or of what? Sephiroth must have hinted at it.”</p><p>“Not clearly. In the Lifestream, I couldn’t get close enough to listen to him. I guess the Planet would have known more, although if I had accepted the gift of its knowledge—”</p><p>“You would have become one with it. And lost yourself.”</p><p><em>I have lost nothing, </em>said a voice that was not hers. <em>Living hearts become one. That is their fate. It is time for you to receive yours.</em></p><p>She thought of Cloud, lost and alone, and said, Never.</p><p>She turned against the Lifestream’s current. The force of it was a bleak glass wall, and the spirits of her ancestors streamed around her, pulling and thrashing. She knew she could not fight forever. Once her strength ran out, she would be broken down and swept along—or else the Planet would reject her as it had rejected the Geostigmatic, leaving her at the mercy of the alien oblivion.</p><p>Still, hopelessly, she fought her way upstream.</p><p>“How?” he asks. “Why?”</p><p>“I don’t know,” she says. “I had no choice.”</p><p>The Lifestream was an endless river of memories that flowed through the fabric of existence itself, and as she cut through it, she could feel time and space parting around her. She realized then that there was one place her soul could go where the Planet could not hope to touch her.</p><p>There, she would have a body. She would have a living heart. Most of all, it was a place where a solution could be found.</p><p>Not a place. A time.</p><p>But she did not want to go there alone.</p><p>The Lifestream, having realized her plan, became a storm at sea. It howled its disapproval. <em>Who is this child of mine?</em> Yet even this could not stop her. She dove down until she saw the darkness writhing at the bottom of the lattice of the immaterial universe. The darkness’s face turned up to her with pillars of heaven in its eyes and an abyss of hungry teeth, yet even this could not stop her from reaching out to the two souls shimmering like coins in its viscous body.</p><p>She asked them, Do you want to live?</p><p>And with those two souls in tow, she swam for light. She knew that some silver-tailed monster was giving chase from below, and that the roar of the Planet would echo through her ears for a thousand nights—<em>I won’t let you do this.</em></p><p>I won’t let you do this.</p><p>She reached ten years into the past.</p><p>“And for what?” Rufus is laughing, his throat bared. He can’t help it. His eyes feel wild in his face. “What hope could you possibly have seen, that would give you the ending you want?”</p><p>“The cure for Geostigma,” she says, stopping his laughter. “It was always simple, really. Destroy Jenova, and the sickness will never spread.”</p><p>“Sephiroth was killed and her body reduced to dust, it did nothing.”</p><p>“Because neither of those things <em>actually destroyed Jenova. </em>Even if her body is gone, her essence will keep circulating through the Lifestream. The Cetra must have known that. That’s why they sealed her away in the Northern Crater—because they knew killing her wouldn’t be enough to get rid of her. And it’s not as easy as killing Sephiroth, either.” Rufus feels offended on behalf of his plans. “Whether he dies now or of old age in a hundred years, Jenova will claim his soul and use it to start another outbreak of Geostigma. Don’t you see? We never found a way to finish it properly.”</p><p>Rufus can spare her no patience. “Brazen. You don’t even know if a way exists.”</p><p>“If it doesn’t, we’ll just have to make one.”</p><p>“We?” All this time, he has been wondering why she would have brought him back alongside Cloud. It is not because they know each other. Nor is it because Rufus has been kind and generous to her friends. He is responsible for a continental population of bad deaths, the disappearance of most flowers, and, objectively, all of Sephiroth’s misdeeds. If her goal is to purge the world of its great evils, she is an idiot to re-introduce the Shinra name.</p><p>Or is she?</p><p><em>We, </em>like she needs him. Cloud said the same thing—that she <em>needs </em>him.</p><p>Aerith Gainsborough wants to know the alien’s weakness. If that secret rests anywhere, it is with the people who have studied the alien most extensively. The Cetra are dust and have taken their secrets beyond the river, much less the grave, but Shinra has worked extensively to preserve both the Cetra and Jenova, alongside conducting research efforts of their own.</p><p>And who would have the access, authority, and ample resources to investigate the company's affairs?</p><p>The fireworks cease.</p><p>“For you, Cloud was an easy choice. He’s your friend. You wish to protect him.” Something is rising within him. He would not call it kindness. “You chose me,” he says, “because I was useful.”</p><p>“Shinra must be hiding something,” says the girl in answer, and Rufus’s smile is an act of violence that he redirects onto the plate. “Just like the Cetra must have known more. My friends and I never learned just how much there was to know, but now we have the chance to get to the bottom of it. Plus—” He can hear the nerve of her, smiling too. Smiling back. “It’s technically our families we’re talking about. Isn’t it fitting that we team up against them, you and I?”</p><p>The plate is a marvel of structural engineering. It carries itself firmly and with ease. Rufus used to wonder what it was like when Sector 7 fell, to watch your whole world buckle under fire and metal, rushing towards you like the tide. In that moment you would have already entered the Lifestream; your mind has approximated water. The steel sky collapsing like a book riffled shut, you would have felt as heavy as the ink of your name, there on the bottom page, illegible. You would have felt as small as a single domino at the end of a magnificent effect. And then, as a god or a bird, you would see it all rewind—the button press, the struggle, the helicopters mobilizing, the orders passed between manila folders—until finally you are there, at the calculation.</p><p>He can guess, now, what that felt like.</p><p>There are no clouds from which Aerith Gainsborough can cry or sweat or spit down onto the undercity, but there does not need to be. Up there, on that plate, is where she belongs. She and Cloud should switch places; she in the tower, he in the church. She, more than him, is Rufus’s understudy. She has spotted Rufus across a crowded room and taken note: <em>I will need this man’s name. This one will have his uses.</em></p><p>“Terrifying,” he says.</p><p>“Well, I also thought you’d be the type of person to work well under pressure.” Her tone is teasing.</p><p>He reloads his smile and lets her see down the barrel of it. “I’m not talking about the pressure.”</p><p>She is puzzled.</p><p>Then she is troubled. “I’m just your local florist, Mr. Shinra.”</p><p>That cold feeling in him is gone, and something else is growing in its place. It has a molten core and a twisted sense of humor. “And what does the Planet have to say about the actions of a local florist?”</p><p>She winces. “It…won’t speak to me. I don’t think it’s too pleased with what I’ve done.”</p><p>“You don’t think that will have repercussions?" he asks. "The Planet itself, displeased.”</p><p>“I knew that changing our fates wouldn’t be easy.”</p><p>“Changing—” The thought finally occurs to him—who does she think she is? “You broke fate in half.”</p><p>“I know. But I’ve already made my decision.”</p><p>And what of Rufus's decisions? He would have been better off taking that pill in Cardina’s lounge. At least then he would still be able to consider the possibility that he was the Planet’s chosen. And if that were true, then perhaps the Planet, like this girl, might have only picked him for his skillset. It is not like he doesn’t understand the utilitarian approach: pick the tool in the toolbox that is most efficient for the problem. If he were playing god, he would pick himself too.</p><p> But he is realizing now—and the girl is teaching him so many things tonight—that this feeling blistering his insides cannot be tamed with empathy. What was it that he wanted? Not to understand, nor to accept. He wanted to be surprised, blinded, his reality splintered apart. He wanted the Planet to be everything he is not, and the truth to overthrow him with a new decree: you are alive and there are no conditions, no expectations. Just boundless, terrifying freedom.</p><p>And if he could not have that, he wanted a world in which it was still possible for his life to have been a gift.</p><p>And Aerith Gainsborough has destroyed it. In her story the Planet is a merciless self-serving host, humanity a sacrifice fated for slaughter, Rufus a fool to have ever wished for anything else, and their hero some girl who is only halfway better than human. That would explain the dualities. She has travelled across time and space to free them from destiny’s shackles; she has brought back Rufus Shinra to be her pawn. "You have saved us from certain doom by exchanging it for an uncertain one, is that it?”</p><p>“It doesn’t have to be doom at all,” she says. “Not if I take responsibility.”</p><p>“It's not you who has to take anything.” Cloud is loved; Rufus is useful. “All you have to do is sit back and watch, now that you've drafted me in your war against providence.”</p><p>Her voice tightens. “It's not like that."</p><p>“I’m at the front of the line, Ms. Gainsborough, I should have a clear understanding of these things."</p><p>He has upset her. That is one way to get on the same page. “Listen, I know I didn’t have time to explain any of this in the Lifestream, and I’m sorry about that, really. But—"</p><p>“I am well past the indignation of having been victim to a con.”</p><p>“It’s not a <em>con!</em> You’re alive again, aren’t you?”</p><p>“But there are,” he says, smiling, “conditions.”</p><p>“What are you saying? We could change the future so that nobody has to go through that again—that pain, that loss! Aren’t you willing to fight for that? Don’t you <em>want </em>that?”</p><p>It is a ridiculous question. Of course he does. He has already made plans and mentally committed to them. He wants what she wants, to prevent Geostigma by whatever means necessary, and if that truly means that he must defy the will of the Planet—so be it.</p><p>None of that is the problem.</p><p>“Why would I?” Rufus steps forward. She steps backward. <em>This</em> is the problem. “Because I care so deeply about my fellow human beings?”</p><p>“Yes,” she grits out. “Because you’re not the same man who tried so hard to kill my friends.”</p><p>“Oh, Ms. Gainsborough. For all you know, I could have been lying to Cloud through my teeth. Say I never wanted redemption for Shinra’s crimes after all, and it was only a pretense that allowed me to survive.” Their shoes crunch against pebbled concrete. “In which case, I could be anyone to you.”</p><p>At the end of the day, he can accept Aerith Gainsborough’s world, just as he can accept the role of Aerith Gainsborough’s hound. Work is work. It does not matter if he walks or crawls towards the objective; dignity is for those who still believe life has a floor. But there are still some things he cannot tolerate, and this is one of them:</p><p>The girl is staring at him like he is all her worst fears come alive.</p><p>“Who shall I be today?” he asks. “Your soldier, or your executioner?” He takes another step forward.</p><p>This time, the girl doesn’t move, but her hands tremble. It makes him sick. She has survived Shinra’s persecution, battled Sephiroth, witnessed horrors on the boundary of imagination. She has fought and won against the will of the Planet. She has stolen from Jenova and come back to life to tell of it.</p><p>And she fears him <em>this much?</em></p><p>God knows that Rufus is Shinra’s monster through and through, but he believed that at the very least, there would be a lower bound, a ground level. And yet here she is, pushing him ever below.</p><p>He is pathetic for being gutted like this. It is wretched of him. What used to be himself is now his cage, and this snarling mangy feeling is now all that he is. She is putting on the lock on him with those trembling hands. Rufus could tear them clean off her arms, give her a real reason for terror like that, and Tseng will kill him for it—which is why the urge is there, which is why he is acting on it.</p><p>“I could kill you, if there was any chance that your death would appease the Planet after your sacrilege,” he says, dulcet soft. “Did you even think about that?”</p><p>“I did,” she says. “Think about it.”</p><p>Rufus looks, really looks at her.</p><p>“I thought about what would happen if you really were still that person,” she continues. “I thought that, if I were you, I wouldn’t listen to me at all.” Her eyes are stars of terror—and anger. “I’d take over the world instead.”</p><p>He smiles, long and slow. “Oh?”</p><p>“Mm-hm.” She starts to circle him. He has no idea what to make of her anymore. “I’d say, let Shinra keep sucking the mako out of the earth! And let Jenova keep dreaming. Sephiroth might be a bit of a problem, but, um…” She falters. “What<em> would</em> I do about that?”</p><p>“Anyone can be contained. Throw him into one of Hojo’s capsules and he’ll live to fossilhood.”</p><p>“Right! And then Geostigma won’t be a problem. That way, even if the future generations burn, I’ll still live a long, happy life as king of the whole doomed hill. And I’ll never even have to pay the price.” She nods, pleased with herself in the role of Rufus Shinra. “I mean, that’s what I would do, if I were you. But I’m not.” She is burning. “Don’t you see? There’s nothing in the rulebook that says you have to be the person I think you are.”</p><p>He cannot believe what he is hearing. “Is that really the basis of your trust in me?” he asks, not even bothering with his tone. “Desperate hope that I’ll defy expectations?”</p><p>“I trust that you took my hand, Mr. Shinra.” Her voice grows quiet. “You didn’t know me, or what I wanted, or what kind of ride this would be. But when I offered a way out of the darkness, you took it. And that couldn’t have been easy.” Wasn’t it? Rufus doesn’t remember the weight of his own hand. “You would have needed a reason to want to live again.” A list of names wouldn’t render them. “Not just a reason—a memory.” Elena, teary with laughter. <em>Now I’m really gonna miss you. </em>“Something that made you believe, really believe—”</p><p>Tseng, holding his beer bottle up to the twilight and swirling its contents. The color was walking slowly away from them. <em>What are you thinking?</em></p><p>“—that you deserve better than a sorry place in the dark.”</p><p>Rufus snaps awake.</p><p>The girl has turned to gaze over the railing. “I want the same, Mr. Shinra,” she says. “I want better for you. For Cloud. For the people I’ve met, and the people I haven’t.” Her head tilts up towards the ceiling of the undercity. “People who have already lived. People who aren’t ready to be born yet.”</p><p>Her back is to him. The thought arrives, unbidden: <em>you’re a lot tougher than you look</em>. “You’re ambitious.”</p><p>“So are you.” She laces her hands together, though not in prayer. “I used to hear so many rumors about you. Rufus Shinra, the man who’s never bled or cried.” A laugh twitches its finger in him. “But…you’re human too. That’s what I trust. And that’s also why I can’t force you to help me.”</p><p>He watches her next breath shudder through her shoulders. “And so?”</p><p>“Whatever being human means,” she says, “that’s up to you.”</p><p>Again with these unrealistic dualities. The girl feared he could be anyone; the girl hoped he could be anyone. She does not want him to be just anyone; she has faith that he can be just anyone.</p><p>Aerith Gainsborough is terrified of, and believes in, the unknown.</p><p>How is that possible? How can someone have so much to lose and still risk it all for more? It is like the opposite of suicidality, the extreme on the other side of the spectrum. He never even knew anyone could reach that place. He did not know, when he went looking for the boundaries of her daring, that an abyss would gaze back into him.</p><p>His head is pounding. If he tests his hands now with a coin, they will not be steady. “And if it means I want it the other way?” he asks. “You dead, and the world to my liking?”</p><p>“I’d fight back.”</p><p>“And lose.”</p><p>“Maybe.” Her grin fades quickly. “And that would be hard. But, even then…I don’t know.” She blinks back tears of neither anger nor fear. <em>How can you exist? </em>he thinks in horrible wonder.</p><p>In a small house in Sector 5, her surrogate mother must be staying up late, waiting by the lamplight. Wondering where she is.</p><p>“I held onto what I love,” she says. “There’s no regrets.”</p><p>Heroism is corrupting. Just look at what it has done to Tseng’s girl. She sees a storm and believes there is no other way but through. Between her and Cloud is a pair of strained wings, dragging with water, getting them nowhere.</p><p>Heroism is also contagious. This does not bode well for him. He is already strained enough as it is. It has been four days since he received his memories of the future, and since then, none of his experiences have seemed like they could belong to him. He can’t even explain it. He dreams of things he has never dreamt before in sharp, crystalline sequences. Sunrise wakes him. At home, Darkstar pushes her snout into his hand, and what he feels for her is so dramatic and whole, you’d think there was a haze over him all his life. The smallest things distract him from his thinking: angles of furniture, trains churning above the road, the leathery whisper of Tseng’s hand over the wheel.</p><p>It was never like this before. Things happened to him, and he happened to them, and it was understood that they would keep doing this until the things finally got a good shot in and finished him off. Now it feels like everything is, disturbingly, happening everywhere at once, as if he is just a person in a larger world, but is actually less like a person and more like a hollow open tube for the world to blow through—and where did all his barriers go, all his resistance? Every waking moment scours him so cold and bright, it is painful. There is no other way to describe the ache in him. The problem, ridiculously enough, is that he went from being too dead to being too alive. And it is only going to get worse. This is only the beginning of his life.</p><p>All of this is Aerith Gainsborough’s fault. To live dull, small, and brief was not enough for her. She wanted more life, the most life, life without a trace of death in it, impossible life. And now she is asking him to risk everything, as she has risked everything. Just look at her, bracing for his answer.</p><p>As if it is not predetermined. As if Rufus can still become anyone other than who he is.</p><p>He appreciates the sentiment.</p><p>“Those rumors were meant to scare people, which is usually ideal." His voice sounds strange, even to himself. “But I’ve bled and cried before. Many times.”</p><p>“Me too.” His meaning dawns in her. “So then…you’re not that person after all?”</p><p>“No. Not in some time. Did I make you worry?”</p><p><em>“Yes,”</em> she says. “And you did that on purpose, didn't you." She sounds a little too relieved to hate him for it.</p><p>“To learn your intentions. Don’t sound too disappointed.”</p><p>“It was yours that were questionable the whole time!” But her frown fades quickly. “I know it’s a lot to take in, though. I—"</p><p>“You did well in bringing us back, Ms. Gainsborough. If our <em>families,</em> as you say, are hiding something, it will be buried deeper than the dead can ever find.” Already he is tired these grand gestures of light and darkness, these watery metaphors. Nibelheim is standing. Sector 7 is intact. The Weapons have not yet fired. There is an alien to destroy and an apocalypse to prevent. And time is ticking.</p><p>Her smile is warm. “So then, Mr. Shinra. Will you help me bring it to light?”</p><p>She holds out her hand. One last gesture, then.</p><p>He takes it.</p><p>“Mr. Vice-President," says Tseng.</p><p>The girl leaps a full foot in shock. Rufus tightens his grip on her hand and pulls her in. Tseng is approaching them from the other side of the long quivering walkway, the loveliest storm.</p><p><em>There he is, </em>he can’t help but think. <em>The one who threw my weapon into the water.</em></p><p>“Tseng!” the girl breathes, her face fills with a soft sad joy, as if Tseng is hers, rather than the other way around. Then Tseng’s shoe pings on the metal grill, and she sucks air through her teeth. “Ooh, he’s <em>mad</em> mad.” Her face freezes. “Wait. I never finished the story. Shit!”</p><p>First, Rufus is stunned by the fact that she can swear. Then the rest of her sentence hits him like the rest of the length of a train. <em>“</em>You didn’t?”</p><p>“There’s one more thing—it’s about Sephiroth—”</p><p>“Trust me," he murmurs. What <em>about</em> Sephiroth? They are out of time. He raises his voice. “Count on my bodyguard to cut this lovely meeting short—”</p><p>“What is the meaning of this?” Tseng’s voice is so low it shifts the earth and pleases Rufus’s spine.</p><p>It’s a race to see who can fill in the blanks first, and if Rufus does not win, Tseng will kill him; he does not doubt that for a second. “Tseng, you found me!” he purrs, all wickedness and vice. “This is the young lady who sold those flowers to the inn, as it turns out. We were just getting to know each other. Maybe I’ll even be able to walk you home next time—Aerith, was it?”</p><p>The girl's stare on him is dumbfounded, but what matters more is the way Tseng’s is pulsing between them, making the judgment: Rufus Shinra did not know her before this meeting. He is borderline manic and therefore unaccountable for all his actions. She would not have told him her heritage. The vice-president does not necessarily need to eat a bullet, at least not tonight. “She can get there by herself,” Tseng says slowly. “Can’t you, miss?”</p><p>“Ts—sssir.” The girl extricates her hand and backs away, mostly from Tseng. “Rufus,” she says, accepting his challenge. Another glance at Tseng and even her clothes seem to drain of color. “Um, uh, goodnight.”</p><p>“Goodnight,” says Rufus.</p><p>She makes haste.</p><p>“You couldn’t have looked the other way?” Rufus asks. “I could have accompanied her on a nice walk back to her sector.” Tseng stares at him. “Did you know people actually grow flowers down here? No wonder they can’t rise topside, if they waste all their money on the least profitable hobbies. Not that I told her that. She’s a proud entrepreneur.” Tseng turns and begins heading back down the walkway. Rufus follows chaotically. “I can’t believe you even found me. How did you know I was out? Don’t tell me you Turks peaked into the room I rented. You should have negotiated a seat from me beforehand. That’s just manners. If you don’t say anything, I’m going to return you to your department so they can check you for malfunctions.”</p><p>“You snuck out," says Tseng.</p><p>“Of course I did.” The air warms as they descend from the rooftops to street level. “As fun as a paid whore might be, sometimes I just want to pick up women the normal way. Is that a crime?”</p><p>“As far as anyone in the company is concerned, yes, it is tantamount to an offense. You are not permitted to lose your own detail—”</p><p>“Well, imagine how awkward she’d have felt if an ill omen like you was perched on my shoulder the whole—”</p><p>Tseng’s glove snaps taut against his wrist. “She’s a <em>child.”</em></p><p>It is warm because Rufus is in hell. “She looked of age.”</p><p>“You were wrong.”</p><p>“To guess or to look?”</p><p>“Perhaps,” Tseng says, “both.”</p><p>“You sound so certain. Don’t tell me you know her or someth—”</p><p>Tseng <em>rounds</em> on him. Rufus backs up too quickly, trips over his own legs, and slams against the wall. He starts to laugh.</p><p>Tseng does not get angry like Rufus does. He turns flat and severe; Rufus always thinks of the frozen lakes near the Sleeping Forest, their lush lacerated surfaces. His first instinct is to use his words with martial efficiency. When someone like Elena irritates him, he is a hard, patient teacher. When someone like Heidegger irritates him, he wages a years-long cold war. Either way, being annoyed in nuanced, complex, infinite ways is the entire range of his temper.</p><p>But <em>this.</em> Rufus has never seen Tseng in a rage so pure that it blocks all the light in its surroundings. He is breathtaking. His tone slides into Rufus at an upward angle from under the ribcage. “This was extremely reckless of you. I warned you of the potential consequences and you heard <em>nothing</em> of what I said. Our agents cannot guarantee your safety if you insist on behaving in this manner.”</p><p>It is easy for Rufus to pretend like he’s still trashed. Aerith Gainsborough has spiked his night with the desperate truth of the universe. Also, Tseng’s aura sears miles of space outside his body; Rufus has never been in closer proximity to a human being. It’s tempting to pass out. “And what manner is that?”</p><p>“Like a liability towards the company you will someday inherit.”</p><p>“That’s not a very subordinate tone, Tseng. You haven’t said ‘sir’ once. Is this really how Veld picks them?”</p><p>“I respect those who respect my time.”</p><p>“And what do you do to those who don’t? Kill them? Torture them? Punish them?” The more he can rile Tseng up, the less likely Tseng will remember the details of this event. That’s the strategic reason. The more indulgent reason is that it feels like there are multiple different rhythms beating in Rufus’s body, and it is tearing him apart at the seams. He cannot stop thinking about how nice it would be to have a hand or a knee on the funnel of his throat or the small of his back or the slope of his hip, shoving them into their rightful places.</p><p>“Your fantasies about the Turks are duly noted,” Tseng says, spiteful.</p><p>“Let’s talk about your fantasies.” Rufus lifts from the wall like a scent. A neon sheen paints the crack between their bodies. “If you’d like to put your hands around my throat and squeeze until I’m begging you to stop, don’t hesitate. I’m more inclined to obey a man whose proven not to be a coward.”</p><p>“I don’t need to prove anything to you.”</p><p>“Only you don’t get to decide that.” Rufus’s whisper becomes a snarl. <em>“I </em>do.”</p><p>Sheer fury crackles like static on the panels of Tseng's face. In the future, somewhere between the house arrest and the end of the world, he developed an immunity to Rufus’s taunts, Rufus grew bored of testing them, and then they knew each other too well to go back. In the present, Tseng has had no such experience.</p><p>What is he thinking about? Rufus can't help but wonder what he knows. There are folklores built upon fortune-telling, premonitions, flashes of future sight—all of them commercial and absurd. And yet, Rufus thinks that if Tseng lifts his hands, closes them around Rufus’s neck, and slams him back against the wall so hard he sees stars, it will be because of a whisper has echoed across time and space to tell him exactly who will ruin his life.</p><p>And he is so, so close to hearing it, the edge of him hovering sharp and ready over Rufus. Rufus’s thoughts sink lower and lower into his body. “I’ll never stop,” he whispers, and Tseng’s eyes widen almost imperceptibly. “Never.” Their breaths fold over each other. “So what are you going to do about it?”</p><p>The silence roars and roars.</p><p>Tseng shifts his weight.</p><p>And then he takes a curt step backwards, straightens, and lifts his head. “You are to return home immediately,” he says. “Your recreational activities will be placed under review until further notice. Our department will wipe any possible surveillance of your presence here in Sector 6—”</p><p>Rufus leans against the wall, dizzy and exhausted.</p><p>“—and for all future outings your detail will be instructed to discourage your…demonstrated behaviors.”</p><p>“You’re no fun at all,” he declares. Tseng gives him one of his work smiles, the kind he reserves for a hit tied to the train tracks—dark and sweet, the last thing people see. “Or, what,” asks Rufus, surprised, “am <em>I</em> some sort of joke to you?”</p><p>“What you are to me,” answers Tseng, “is a lesson in restraint.” With a single fluid step, and a sweep of his arm, he opens the path back to the inn. “After you.”</p><p><em>To drown in a lake, </em>Rufus thinks, <em>would be pristine.</em></p><p>Slowly, he pulls up his mask, and staggers upright. The steam of the district’s late night fills his jacket, and the restlessness in him just keeps going. It is maddening.</p><p>But survivable? It had better be. It's all downhill from here, down and down into Gaia knows where. Not wanting to keep Tseng waiting, he plunges back into the night.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I love what Remake has done to Rufus’s personality arc. He starts off saying shit like “dance for me” and “naughty naughty” while beating up Cloud outside the tower. Then OtWtaS Episode Shinra happens, the events of which are so fucked up that it strips him down to his weird quiet essentials; hence, AC. It's fun to write him because, by the end of the compilation, the margins of his canonical character are so wide, you have so much freedom to decide who he really is.</p><p>And thank you guys for your comments on the first chapter! Next one will finish the set-up, and the plot will take off from there. No flight plan, but who needs one?(!?!?!)</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>